PS2J 339 News – Karts Over Boards

March 19, 2021
Tagged as: 2021, 2d, 4:3, abzu, action, adaptive trigger, Adventure, advertising, AI, Alan, aloy, analog sticks, ancient, app tracking transparency, Apple, arid, art book, astro bot, backup, beetle, Bethesda, Boba Fett, bow, Braid, bullet hell, buy-out, bytedance, cable, caid, caravan of courage, cellular, charm, China, china advertising id, Clone Wars, co-op, Comics, complete edition, computer, controller, couch party edition, crew, database, DC, developer, dexter’s lab, digital, Disney Plus, DLC, Dreamcast, enter the gungeon, Epic Games, ewoks, exception, exploration, Facebook, fallout 76, financial times, First Person, flower, Free Games, friends, frozen wilds, Gamestop, genndy tartakovsky, Government, gradius, grip, hacker, haptic feedback, hbo max, holiday special, horizon zero dawn, idfa, illusion, imax, information, Instagram, Internet, invasive, iOS, Josh, Journey, Justice League, knuckle, LAN, Legend Of Zelda, logic, machine, moss, mouse, Multiplayer, music, myst, Netflix, oculus touch, official, open-world, optica, paper beast, PC, pcloud, Phone, photo, pilot, platform, platformer, play at home, Playstation, pounding, Privacy, procedural, ps+, PS2, PS4, ps5, PSVR, puzzle, quill, rail, redwall, rescue mission, rez, rez infinite, rhythm, rogers, roguelike, role-playing, RPG, Samurai Jack, secret, sharing, Shaw, shoot ’em up, Shooter, side scrolling, sneaky, snyder cut, social, Sony, Space, spatial, spear, Star Wars, subnautica, survival, swimsanity, synesthesia, table, techno, the battle for endor, the fall, the new responders, the story of the faithful wookie, the witness, third person, thumper, tiktok, tracking, trippy, Twitch, two of them, underwater, verify, versus, warning, YouTube, zack snyder

Free Games

Twitch
- Swimsanity – Couch Party Edition
  - 2020
  - Multiplayer 2D underwater shoot-em-up with co-op and versus game modes, and both online and local play. It’s like Gradius in the ocean with your friends
- Optica
  - 2018
  - Puzzle game of logic and illusion with a basic geometric design, that has you putting your spatial thinking to the test with everything from curious shapes to optical illusions
Epic Games
- The Fall
  - 2014
  - Action-adventure side-scrolling platform game where you play Arid, an artificial intelligence installed in an advanced combat space suit, as you explore a decaying industrial facility in search of medical attention for the suit’s injured pilot
Sony Play at Home 2021
- Free for everyone who owns a PS4 or PS5, not just PS+ subscribers
- March 25
  - ABZU
    - 2016
    - From the art director of Journey and Flower, ABZÛ is a wordless underwater adventure that evokes the dream of diving, taking you on a journey through the ruins of an ancient civilization.
  - Enter the Gungeon
    - 2016
    - Roguelike bullet hell with procedurally generated levels, following four adventurers with different special abilities as they descend into the Gungeon to find a gun to kill their past
  - Rez Infinite
    - 2016
    - An expanded release of the musical rail shooter originally released on the Dreamcast and PS2, it has you following a hacker’s journey into a malfunctioning AI system in a way that tries to create a sense of synesthesia
  - Subnautica
    - 2018
    - Open world survival action-adventure game that drops you on an alien planet covered with water where you have to build, survive, and uncover the secrets buried under the waves
  - The Witness
    - 2016
    - First person puzzle exploration game, a la Myst, developed by the creator of Braid
  - PSVR
    - Astro Bot Rescue Mission
      - 2018
      - Third person platformer with a ton of charm that has you exploring 5 different worlds to rescue your lost crew
    - Moss
      - 2018
      - Adventure game that feels like a mix between Redwall and The Legend of Zelda, that transports you to a fantasy land to help a young mouse named Quill defeat a fire-breathing snake and save her uncle
    - Thumper
      - 2016
      - Rhythm game that has you guiding a beetle-like creature along a set of rails and through different obstacles, all to trippy visuals and the beat of pounding techno
    - Paper Beast
      - 2020
      - First person adventure game where you explore a large ecosystem made up of various digital life forms originating from lost internet code
- April 19
  - Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition
    - 2017
    - Open world action RPG that follows Aloy, a young hunter in a world overrun by machines, who sets out with her bow and spear to uncover her past
    - The Complete Edition comes with the full game, the Frozen Wilds expansion, a digital art book, a PS4 dynamic theme, and bonus weapons, outfits, and resources

A state-backed group in China wants to get around App Tracking Transparency and track app users with a controversial new “China Advertising ID”, or CAID

There’s currently a feature on iPhones that’s a little sneaky where developers can store text information in your keychain and access it across any of your devices
- The really sneaky piece that’s just ripe for abuse comes in where these objects are not only accessible from any of the developer’s apps (not just the one that stored it), but they’re also not cleaned up when you delete an app
  - So for example if you installed Instagram and deleted it, then installed Facebook, Facebook would be able to identify that you’re the same person
  - And the worst part about this is it applies to things like advertising or authentication code, so if you have an app that uses Google for ads or Facebook for logins then it can read and write that same information shared by all apps by those specific developers
Well in response to Apple giving users control over who can track them by official means, it sounds like Chinese companies may be working with the China Advertising Association to use this information to build a database of users for tracking purposes
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, released an 11-page guide to app developers that was obtained by the Financial Times, suggesting that advertisers “can use the CAID as a substitute if the user’s IDFA is unavailable”
Apple has denied that they would be granting any exceptions to the new tracking rules, saying that apps found to disregard a user’s choice would be rejected, and one person familiar with the situation said that Apple would be able to detect which apps use the CAID and potentially block them.
- Unfortunately if this takes off it could be Apple vs the Chinese government, and if the majority of apps in China start using the CAID it could lead to some serious repercussions
Yang Congan, the chief executive of a Beijing-based data privacy company, suggested that CAID had been designed to get around Apple’s rules because it might not “uniquely” identify users, but that’s sophistry at best and an outright lie at worst
I think the best way forward to be to rethink how exactly apps from the same developer can access data on your account, and give users more control over that piece as well. The feature may have been designed with the intention of streamlining the user experience and letting developers recover sessions or logins, but using it to smuggle data across apps should be a clear violation of developer agreements

Sony’s unveiled the planned controller for their next generation of PSVR, and it looks pretty slick

The controller looks like an evolution of the latest Oculus Touch, but they’ve put the tracking ring a little further back around your hand and wrist
- It looks like it’ll be pretty well balanced, though after having third-party knuckle grips for my Oculus I can definitely see wanting them here, too
They’ll also have adaptive triggers on both sides, haptic feedback, finger detection, and analog sticks on both controllers
- With modern VR those analog sticks wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but coming from the previous PSVR they’re a big improvement

This Week In Gaming History

March 13 – 2012 – Yakuza: Dead Souls – PlayStation 3 (United States)

The district of Kamurocho has survived gang violence, terrorist bombings, and open mafia war, but the latest threat may be the one that finally destroys the district for good: a zombie apocalypse.
- As the city burns four men search for answers: Shun Akiyama, the enigmatic moneylender from Yakuza 4; Goro Majima, Leader of the Tojo clan’s Majima family; Ryuji Gouda, exiled former-chairman of the Omi Alliance and antagonist of Yakuza 2; and the Dragon of Dojima, Kazuma Kiryu.
Yakuza: Dead Souls is the sequel to Yakuza 4, taking place one year afterwards but with a decidedly more fantastic premise.
- The game also has a radically new combat engine, as the living dead can easily shrug off kicks and punches.
- Each character can equip up to four weapons at a time, from pistols with unlimited ammunition to wide-spread shotguns, powerful anti-armor rifles, and incendiary grenades.
- While inside the quarantined areas of Kamurocho the player can be swarmed by zombies at any time, with more than twenty attacking at once.
- In addition to zombies they will also face mutants, such as the quick and agile Monkeyboy or the zombie-summoning Cry Baby, who are stronger and will require different tactics.
- Even more dangerous Prototypes will appear as bosses during the storyline.
Like previous Yakuza games sidestories are often available between story missions.
- The quarantine has disrupted many people’s lives, and they need help getting back into the infected areas to save someone or finish some business.
- A new feature to Dead Souls are Perfect Partners, as some of these people in need will permanently join the protagonists, entering the quarantine when called and leveling up and gaining new abilities alongside them.
- Most of the minigames of previous Yakuza games, such as dining, hostess bars, batting cages, crane machines, and more are all present.
- The coliseum does not return, but in its place is the Subterreania, a randomly generated dungeon filled with enemies that rewards the player the deeper they go.

March 14 – 1986 – Night Fire – DOS

As artillery games are wont to do, Night Fire sticks each player into the stuffy interior of a tank, placed somewhere on a randomly generated terrain, and pits the participants (2 to 8 of them) against one another in a merry free-for-all of ballistic abandon.
- The objective? stay alive, and prevent your opponents from doing the same by feeding them carefully-measured portions of flaming death.
Each player in turn can either move or shoot – moving is useful for improving tactical positions (and avoiding an untimely demise when enemy shells start getting too close).
- For shooting, the barrel angle and shell velocity can be modified as needed.
- Presiding over the battle is the full moon, which provides more than ambiance: it helpfully displays on its disc two gauges, indicating air friction and the wind’s speed and direction, which also have to be taken into account.
Josh played this, if not a very faithful recreation of it.

March 15 – 1997 – Snowboard Kids – Nintendo 64 (North America)

A racing game where you control one of five cutesy snowboarders competing against each other.
- Being a snowboarding game, each track is a downhill slalom with a ski lift at the bottom which takes you back to the start for however many laps a track has.
The tracks are varied, the first few taking place on snowy mountainsides, while the latter taking you to wackier locales such as grassy countryside, a desert and a theme park.
- The money collected on the course or won at the end of the race can be spent to buy better boards, which differ in stats, or to collect items/weapons while racing.
- There are also stunts that can be performed while racing which earn money as well, and certain parts of each course encourage the player to do so.
Other modes include stunt mode, shoot mode and speed mode, all focusing on a particular part of the gameplay from the main game, and a multiplayer mode where up to 4 players can race each other.
- There are also unlockables for dedicated players.

March 16 – 2010 – Metro 2033 – Windows, Xbox 360

Plot:
- In the year 2013 almost all of humanity was wiped out as a result of a devastating war, and Earth’s surface became a nuclear wasteland.
  - The few survivors in Moscow retreated to the city’s subway tunnels.
  - But even underground, human society continued to develop in predictable ways.
  - Factions were formed, and stations and entire lines were occupied by ideologically opposed groups of people.
  - War continued on a much smaller scale, adding to the difficulty of living under nearly impossible conditions, fearing the dark subway tunnels which harbored terrifying creatures.
- Artyom was born a few days before the apocalypse, but raised in the underground.
  - Up until now he had never left the relative safety of the Exhibition, the northernmost station in the Moscow metro, where he lived together with his stepfather.
  - However, everything changes when a soldier called Hunter arrives at the station, warning its inhabitants about a group of mysterious creatures known as the Dark Ones.
  - When Artyom realizes that Hunter will never return from his mission, he decides to travel through the tunnels to the central Polis station and get help there.
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter with survival horror elements, based on the Russian book of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky.
- Most of the game takes place underground, but several times Artyom will have to venture outside, into the perpetual nuclear winter.
- Game progression is fairly linear, though areas may be explored more thoroughly for items and ammunition.
- Setpieces include a few on-rails sequences, missions that involve defending a location from an onslaught of monsters, and others.
- A few stages can be completed in a stealthy fashion.
Mutants and hostile humans are the enemies of the game; Artyom can use a variety of weapons to deal with them, including AK-47, sniper rifle, automatic shotgun, and others.
- The player can only carry a sidearm and two primary weapons at the same time.
- Dynamite sticks and knives complete the set.
- All weapons come in different variations with scopes, silencer and other upgrades attached.
- While the upgrades cannot be bought individually, already upgraded weapons can be purchased at shops in the stations in exchange for the old weapon and powerful military-grade ammunition, the only currency in the game.
- If Artyom is hit, he slowly regenerates his health automatically; however, medikits are available to instantly heal him and increase the regeneration rate for a few seconds.
When traveling on the surface or through poisoned areas, Artyom needs to equip his gas mask in order to survive.
- The filter of the gas mask wears down as it is being used (indicated by Artyom’s special watch and his heavier breathing) and can even be damaged in melee fights, straining the filter even more.
- Other tools available to Artyom are a pair of night vision goggles, a flashlight, a light-meter, a lighter, his journal with a compass, and a charging device.
- The latter is required to manually recharge the flashlight and the night vision goggles once their energy gets low.
- The light-meter, on the other hand, helps Artyom to determine if he is hidden in the shadows, helping him to avoid some dangers.
Other environmental hazards include seeking anomalies and strange, sometimes deadly visions.
- These visions play a role in the game’s plot, and also serve as moral judgment of Artyom’s behavior, along with his actions during certain situations involving hostile human organizations.
- Depending on these choices, the game will reach one of the two available endings.

March 17 – 1995 – Descent – DOS

Plot:
- The Post-Terran Minerals Corporation (PTMC) digs up minerals on all nine planets of the solar system, employing humans and robots to do its job.
  - Unfortunately, the mining robots are now being controlled by a hacker, and have taken the human workers hostage.
  - The PTMC has tried to get the robots back under their control, but communication with the mining stations has been lost.
  - In desperation, the PTMC modifies a Pyro-GX ship for combat and hires a mercenary, codenamed “Material Defender”, to fly it.
  - The mission is to destroy the infected mines and rescue human hostages, destroying any hostile robot that gets in the way.
Descent is a 3D first-person game that puts the player at the controls of the Pyro-GX spaceship.
- Descent is notable in that the player travels through various interior locations (mines) but can do so in 720 degrees of movement.
  - The ship however only moves forward and backward in any of the directions it is facing.
  - The ship is able to use a variety of weapons scattered as power-ups throughout each level.
  - They include: standard lasers, the Vulcan Cannon (a chaingun-like weapon), the Spreadfire Cannon (a rapidly firing, shotgun-like energy weapon), the Plasma Cannon (a rapidly firing energy weapon more suited for medium-range combat), and the Fusion Cannon (fires a ball of energy that’s more powerful the longer it is charged it up, but could destroy the ship).
  - All of these weapons, except for the Vulcan Cannon, use the ship’s energy supply.
  - The Pyro-PX is also capable of firing regular concussion missiles, homing missiles, proximity bombs (sits in the sky, then explodes when something gets close to it), smart missiles (more powerful homing missiles that fire out homing energy balls upon impact with their target), and Mega Missiles (the ultimate weapons of mass destruction).
The goal of each level is to locate and destroy the mine’s reactor.
- Once completed, there are only 45 seconds to find the escape hatch to get out of the mine before it explodes.
- As progress is made through the game, the AI will adapt to player’s strategies and attempt to prevent the player from reaching the goals.
This was the first 3D game Josh can remember playing.

March 18 – 1992 – Minesweeper – Windows 3.x

Minesweeper is a puzzle game in which the player is presented with a board filled with mines, without knowing what fields they occupy.
- When the player clicks on a field a number appears on it, indicating how many mines are located in the fields nearest to it.
- The player then clicks on other fields, trying to avoid mines.
- If the player makes a mistake, the mine will explode and the game is over.
- The game features three difficulty levels, distinguished by the size of the board – the bigger the board, the higher the difficulty level.

March 19 – 2007 – Tetris Evolution – Xbox 360

Tetris Evolution is one of the many officially-licensed Tetris games. The game features seven game modes, several of which return from Tetris Worlds.
- Marathon – Standard, timeless Tetris, where the goal is to clear as many lines as possible.
- Ultra – Try to earn as many points as possible in a timed game.
- Cascade – Clearing lines can cause placed pieces to fall, potentially clearing more lines for big points.
- Race – Clear a set number of lines as quickly as possible.
- Score – Reach a designated score as quickly as possible.
- Hotline – Clearing specific highlighted lines will earn bonus points.
- Go Low – The lower the stack is, the more points are gained from clearing a line.
Also included are both local multiplayer and online play over Xbox Live for up to four players.
- There are also a variety backgrounds and BGM to choose from.

Tidbits

Fallout 76 role-playing group The New Responders is making an in-game procedural drama, bringing in other members of the community to join the story and solve the mystery
- Episodes are broadcast weekly live on Twitch and then archived afterwards on YouTube
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars cartoon is finally coming to Disney Plus on April 2nd, along with other Star Wars side-projects like Caravan of Courage and The Story of the Faithful Wookie
- Though it’s no longer canon to the Star Wars universe, the series of shorts from the mind that brought us Dexter’s Lab and Samurai Jack is just fantastic and very much worth watching
The Snyder Cut of the Justice League movie is out today on HBO Max, so we’ll have to see if doubling the length of movie can make it into a better one
- Don’t adjust your TV when you’re watching though- the whole film is shown in a 4:3 display ratio, because Snyder wanted it fully IMAX-ready
Part of the ongoing GameStop stock saga has seen the leak of new GameStop Social spaces, including mini LAN centres and tables for card and board games (presumably once it’s safe to do so)
- If these kinds of things come to EB Games north of the border as well, along with the new push to digital and same-day delivery, this could be a renaissance for the video game retailer
Photo backup service and self-professed online privacy experts pCloud have apparently run an analysis of Apple’s app privacy labels and determined that Instagram and Facebook are “the most invasive apps” when it comes to third party data
- Surprising no-one
Rogers Communications is apparently looking to buy out Shaw, becoming Canada’s second-largest cellular and cable provider
- Canada already has some of the world’s highest costs for cell phone and internet plans, and the $26B plan probably wouldn’t improve the situation
Netflix is reportedly testing a new feature that will show warnings to anyone allegedly sharing their login with someone outside of their home
- The warning pops up asking you to verify their access through a code texted to their phone, but so far there haven’t been any repercussions to just clicking “Verify later”

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PS2J 337 News – Before Dark Souls

March 5, 2021
Tagged as: 120fps, 2k, 4K, 60fps, action, adaptive triggers, Adventure, airplane, Alan, Amazon, anthem, app store, Apple, apple card, apple music, appleid, avalanche, avro lancaster, bad press, balance, bbs, BioWare, blasphemous, bomber crew, bomberman, boomerang fu, brazil amazon, breakout, bullet hell, bye forever, Castlevania, co-op, combat, Comedy, communist, couch, counterstrike, crash, credit card, cvstodia, damnation, deluze, Destiny, Diddy Kong Racing, diesel punk, DLC, dogfight, Dragon Age, dualsense, dustin curtis, ea games, eco-terrorist, Epic Games, ex, facebook marketplace, farpoint, fast laughs, faster, Final Fantasy, final fantasy vii, final fantasy vii remake, First Person, forgot, frames per second, Free Games, From Software, from the aches, haptic feedback, hollow knight, illegal, indigenous, intergrade, Japan, jedi fallen order, Josh, jupiter, Justice League, katana, lifestream, llamanati, lock, m1, Macbook, MacOS, mail, mailtrackerblocker, maquette, marketing, mech, medieval, mercenary, metal slug, metal slug 3, metroidvania, Microsoft, mind control delete, mini review, miscommunication, mistake, narrative, national forest, Netflix, nightmare, One, Online, outstanding, party, photo mode, physics, play at home, Playstation, plugin, pop-up, prime, PS4, ps5, PSVR, puzzle, racing, rainforest, ratchet & clank, Real Time Strategy, red dragon, remnant, reserve, resolution, roguelike-lite-ish, RPG, RTS, s, scroll, sekiro, series, service game, shadows die twice, shinobi, shinra, shmup, shoot ’em up, Shooter, sidescrolling, simulation, sine mora, single-player, skill, skydrift, snyder cut, Sony, Souls, souls-like, soulsborne, Space, strategy, SUPERHOT, superliminal, support, tactical, tengami, third person, tiktok, top-down, tracker, tracking, trade-in, twin stick, Twitch, vanity fair, vicious attack llama apocalypse, VR, warface, wargame, wolf, world war ii, would you like to know more, X, XBox, yuffie

Free Games

Twitch
- Blasphemous
  - 2019
  - A dark medieval Souls-like Metroidvania, Hollow Knight by way of Castlevania, that has you exploring the nightmare world of Cvstodia to break out of eternal damnation
- Bomber Crew Deluxe
  - 2017
  - Strategic simulation game that has you picking the right crew to keep your Avro Lancaster bomber in tip top shape and complete your World War II era missions
- Sine Mora EX
  - 2012
  - 2.5D bullet hell shoot ’em up in a diesel punk inspired world, now with improved visuals and new game modes
- Tengami
  - 2015
  - Adventure puzzle game that takes place in ancient Japan, with an artstyle similar to traditional Japanese painting with a 3D pop-up book look
- SkyDrift
  - 2011
  - Airplane combat racing game similar to the flight mode on Diddy Kong Racing with the addition of dogfights, where you get speed boosts for acrobatic maneuvers or for taking down opponents
- Boomerang Fu
  - 2020
  - Billed as a frantic physics party game, you play as different foods trying to chop eachother up with boomerangs from a top-down Bomberman-style view in a variety of crazy levels
Xbox
- Warface: Breakout
  - 2020
  - Tactical online first person objective shooter along the same lines as Counterstrike, launched as a spin-off from the popular free-to-play Warface
- Vicious Attack Llama Apocalypse
  - 2018
  - Tagline: “The world’s best mass llama-slaughter roguelike-lite-ish couch co-op top-down twin-stick shooter.”
  - You remotely pilot an endless supply of mechs from your ocean carrier offshore of the apocalypse, fighting through the llama hordes to take down The Llamanati
- Metal Slug 3
  - 2000
  - Run and gun sidescrolling shooter that added more weapons and vehicles to the Metal Slug series, as well as introducing branching paths
Playstation
- Final Fantasy VII Remake
  - 2020
  - Action RPG remake of the 1997 Final Fantasy VII, where you play as a mercenary who joins an eco-terrorist group trying to stop the Shinra corporation from using the planet’s essence as a power source
  - This is just the first part of a planned series, where they’ve taken the original game and reworked so much that each part is a full length title on its own
  - One thing to note is that people who get the game for free aren’t eligible for the free PS5 upgrade that we’ll be talking about a little later
- Remnant: From the Ashes
  - 2019
  - Third person action RPG shooter that borrows mechanics from the Soulsborne games with the addition of more gunplay on top of melee combat, where the earth has been decimated and overrun by an interdimensional evil called the Root
- Maquette
  - 2021
  - A first-person recursive puzzle game that takes you into a world where every building, plant, and object are simultaneously tiny and staggeringly huge. It plays a lot like Superliminal but with less challenge, more to serve a narrative experience
- Farpoint
  - 2017
  - VR space adventure set on a hostile alien planet, where you’ve crash-landed after being sent to pick up scientists studying an anomaly near Jupiter
- And don’t forget to grab Ratchet & Clank, free this month for everyone from the Play At Home program
Epic Games
- Wargame: Red Dragon
  - 2014
  - Real-time strategy game that has you engage in a large-scale conflict between Western forces and the Communist bloc

Apple had to deal with some undeserved bad press this week as a story broke accusing them of locking a user’s AppleID due to missed Apple Card payments

In the original story you may have heard, Dustin Curtis started losing access to different areas of his AppleID, first the App Store, then Apple Music, and progressively more and more services, after purchasing a new Mac through the trade-in program and forgetting to send in his old one in exchange. This caused an additional charge to his Apple Card
- Apparently Apple did send a reminder, but when he replied saying he’d never received the trade-in kit he did not get a response
- Then through some detective work and miscommunications he determined that, because his bank account number had changed, the extra charge couldn’t be covered by his normal automatic payments leading to his account being locked
- If this was actually the case it would be a pretty big story, with Apple holding your digital life hostage after one missed credit card payment and treating their charges differently from others on their credit card
The actual story is less sinister, but still one to be aware of
- Apple released a statement first clarifying that the Apple Card and AppleID systems aren’t linked in that way- if you miss payments your AppleID will not be disabled
- What actually happened was, because the trade-in process was left unresolved after the time period expired (around 14 days), and they had provided an instant credit on his purchase for the trade-in, they attempted to charge his account for the balance. Because the bank account number had changed this charge failed and his account was left in bad standing
  - This would have happened with any credit card used, not just Apple’s
- So it’s much more straightforward- if your Apple account is left in bad standing with a balance owing, Apple starts disabling paid services until you cover the charge. Similar to any other bill payment. They don’t block your iCloud though, so messaging and whatnot will still work
In the end the original story has a couple of holes
- Banks generally don’t just change your account number without telling you
- If you do a trade-in, how do you forget you still have the old computer

There’s a fancy new version of Final Fantasy VII Remake coming to the PS5, with bonus DLC featuring Yuffie

June 10th will see a free PS5 upgrade for everyone who paid for the remake, titled Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, though for some reason anyone getting the game for free from PS+ this month will be stuck with the PS4 version instead
- It’s still playable on the PS5 through backwards compatibility, but you won’t see the improved visuals or extra DLC content
- The new features include a graphics mode with 4k resolutions, a performance mode running 60fps, a customizable photo mode (because that’s becoming standard nowadays), faster load times, and extra features using the adaptive triggers and haptic feedback of the Dualsense controller

This Week In Gaming History

February 27 – 2002 – Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure – GameBoy Advance

Crash Bandicoot makes his first appearance on the Game Boy Advance, in this, his 5th adventure against arch nemesis, Dr. Neo Cortex.
- This time Cortex has shrunk the world down to a tiny size and it is up to Crash to explore the 20 levels full of dangerous creatures and terrain to collect crystals that will (hopefully) change the world back to its normal size.
Crash explores 4 worlds, each with 5 levels.
- Levels range from side-scrolling action to underwater swimming and 3D chase sequences (similar to those in the original Playstation series) designed using the GBA’s unique FX features to create a 3D illusion.
- You will also play flying shoot ’em up levels, a boss levels at the end of each world, and the usual extra bonus levels and secret items.

February 28 – 1997 – Turok: Dinosaur Hunter – Nintendo 64

The Earth is separated by an invisible barrier from the Lost Land, a realm in which time has no meaning, and which is inhabited by ferocious dinosaurs and aliens.
- For many generations, the mantle of Turok has been bestowed upon those who saw the protection of the barrier as their sacred duty.
- But an evil lord named Campaigner is seeking for an artifact that is capable of destroying the barrier, striving to dominate the entire universe.
- This artifact, known as the Chronoscepter, was broken into pieces which were then hidden away.
- Tal’Set, a Native American and the last Turok, must find the scattered pieces of the Chronoscepter, and stop the Campaigner from obtaining them.
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person shooter with platforming and light puzzle-solving elements.
- Much of the game is set in outdoor environments, and requires the player to explore them by finding various paths, jumping, swimming, and climbing.
- The game’s most notable enemies are dinosaurs of various sizes, though the levels also include human and demonic enemies, as well as wildlife.
- The player gradually gains access to thirteen weapons (plus the Chronoscepter, assembling which is the game’s main objective); these include a knife, a bow, as well as high-tech firearms such as a rocket launcher and an atomic fusion cannon.
A first for the N64!
- Was the first 1st-person shooter on the console.
- It was also the first third-party release for the Nintendo 64.
German Censorship
- The German version of the game was censored.
- All human opponents were replaced by robots – some of them were exclusively modeled for this release, others were just taken from the last level of the game and used throughout all the other levels as well.
Japanese Title
- The Japanese title translates to Space-time Soldier Turok in English.
Memory Card Goof
- In the United Kingdom, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was the first N64 game released there to require an expansion memory-card in order to save your in-game progress.
- The only problem was, Nintendo had not yet made their official memory-cards available for retail sale in the UK.
- Scrambling to meet market immediate market demand, third-party accessory manufacturers were able to swoop in and fill the gap.
- A notable misstep by Nintendo which could have tanked the release of Turok for the UK.

March 1 – 2001 – Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider – PlayStation, Windows

Sheep Raider is a 3D puzzle game, with gameplay mimicking the wacky contraptions and situations from the original cartoons.
- Players need to catapult themselves across a canyon, camouflage themselves as a bush to sneak past Ralph, lure sheep with sheep perfume etc.
The player takes on the role as starving Ralph Wolf and must help him steal one sheep from Sam Sheep Dog and get it to a certain goal location.
- With a wide arsenal of Acme gadgets at his disposal, Ralph is sure to concoct the perfect plan for keeping his stomach filled, or not!
- The game takes place across 15 various stages as well as 2 hidden stages, each with their own requirements and challenges, so the longevity of the game is notable.
The puzzles consist of finding items and using them at certain location or on certain characters.
- Items include lettuce to lure sheep and mines which can be defused.
- There also are mailboxes with which the player can order a wide arsenal of helpful Acme gadgets.
- Directly after ordering the product is air shipped instantaneously, with a crate falling from the sky.
- Gadgets include a rocket, dynamite, elastic band, a fan, a metal detector and many more.
- Some gadgets are level specific, like for example a time travel gadget with which Ralph can traveling back and forth in time to manipulate placement of rocks and trees.
There are checkpoints throughout each of the levels, although there are no visual clues as to where they are.
- For example, if the player reaches a certain area carrying the sheep and then falls off a cliff, the player plus sheep will be respawned near that area.
- Each level also has a punch clocks, usually in a hidden area, they acts just as an extra collectible.

March 2 – 2004 – Ninja Gaiden – Xbox

When the Vigoor Empire attacks Ryu Hayabusa’s village and steals the Dark Dragon Blade, the ninja vows to seek revenge with his Dragon Sword.
- Gifted with an impressive sets of moves, combining both melee and projectile weapons, you will need to defeat hordes of ninjas and monsters.
- During your journey, you acquire new moves and abilities such as the Art of the Inferno (fire), Ice Storm and Inazuma (thunder-like).
- Other moves include running over water, wall-based combos and ultimate techniques.
- You have to search or shop for special items, armlets, weapons and scrolls that enhance your abilities.
This fast-paced game is known for its hard difficulty (true to the series) and smart enemy AI that hardly relies on patterns.
- The Live! features allow for participating in the Master Ninja Tournament, a nationwide competition with prizes.

March 3 – 2017 -The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch, Wii U

Ad Blurb:
- Step into a world of adventure
- Forget everything you know about The Legend of Zelda games.
  - Step into a world of discovery, exploration, and adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a boundary-breaking new game in the acclaimed series.
  - Travel across vast fields, through forests, and to mountain peaks as you discover what has become of the kingdom of Hyrule In this stunning Open-Air Adventure.
  - Now on Nintendo Switch, your journey is freer and more open than ever.
  - Take your system anywhere, and adventure as Link any way you like.
- Features:
  - Explore the wilds of Hyrule any way you like—anytime, anywhere!
    - Climb up towers and mountain peaks in search of new destinations, then set your own path to get there and plunge into the wilderness.
    - Along the way, you’ll battle towering enemies, hunt wild beasts and gather ingredients for the food and elixirs you’ll make to sustain you on your journey.
    - With Nintendo Switch, you can literally take your journey anywhere.
  - More than 100 Shrines of Trials to discover and explore
    - Shrines dot the landscape, waiting to be discovered in any order you want.
    - Search for them in various ways, and solve a variety of puzzles inside.
    - The tasks you must perform in each Shrine varies, and you’ll never expect the challenges you’ll face until you enter.
    - Some will involve realistic physics, and some will require you to harness the power of nature, including electricity, wind, fire, and more.
    - Work your way through the traps and devices inside, utilizing your runes and think outside the box to earn special items and other rewards that will help you on your adventure.
  - Be prepared and properly equipped
    - With an entire world waiting to be explored, you’ll need a variety of outfits and gear to reach every corner.
    - You may need to bundle up with warmer clothes or change into something better suited to the desert heat.
    - Some clothing even has special effects that, for example, can make you faster or stealthier.
  - Battling enemies requires strategy
    - The world is inhabited with enemies of all shapes and sizes.
    - Each one has its own attack method and weaponry, so you must think quickly and develop the right strategies to defeat them.
  - amiibo compatibility
    - The Wolf Link amiibo from Twilight Princess HD, the Zelda 30th Anniversary series amiibo, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild series amiibo are all compatible with this game.
    - Tap the Wolf Link amiibo (sold separately) to make Wolf Link appear in the game.
    - Wolf Link will attack enemies on his own and help you find items you’re searching for.
    - Tap a Zelda 30th Anniversary series amiibo to receive helpful in-game items or even a treasure chest!
Tribute to Iwata
- The game pays tribute to late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata through the character Botrick, who bears a striking resemblance to Iwata. Botrick tells Link about the Satori Mountain, with “Satori” being derived from Iwata’s first name Satoru. At top of the mountain is a mystical horse called the Lord of the Mountain, whose Hyrule Compendium entry reads:
- “This noble creature watches over all animals that make their homes in the forest. Legends say this holy creature is a reincarnation of a sage that died on the land it now protects. It has an acute awareness of its surroundings, so it seldom appears before people. It’s also known by its other name, Satori.”

March 4 – 2014 – South Park: The Stick of Truth – PS3, Windows, Xbox 360

South Park: The Stick of Truth is an RPG based off the South Park franchise.
- You play as a new kid (Douchebag as known to by Cartman) who just arrived in the town of South Park, Colorado.
- You immediately become thrust into a battle of epic proportions as you join together with many characters such as Kenny and Butters in order to procure the magical Stick of Truth from the evil Elves.
Starting off the adventure you get to choose between four different classes: Warrior, Mage, Thief, and Jew.
- Your appearance is completely customizable at all times with new outfits and accessories able to be found around the town.
- Social networking is an important feature in the game.
- When you meet new characters they become friends with you on the Facebook social network.
- Things like quests, your inventory, the town map, and more are also all displayed on your profile page.
- Your friends will post messages from time to time on your wall and give tips on how to beat quests and on where to find certain characters.
The game is visually made to look just like an episode from the television show.
- Written by South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the story takes place after the season 17 Black Friday episode trilogy. Combat is turn-based and relies on the HP/PP system found in many other games.
- Taking damage reduces your HP and using your abilities/magic to dish out damage consumes your PP.
- HP/PP is completely restores after every battle.
- The character is able to become stronger by changing their equipment and gaining experience in battle.
- After obtaining a certain amount of XP the character levels up and is given upgrade points.
- These points are then used to strengthen your abilities.
- Meeting set amount of characters unlocks different perks to help in battle.

March 5 – 2020 – Walking Simulator – Windows

The year is 2020, world war III and the coronavirus destroyed the civilized world.
- You are the last post carrier, tasked to get parcels from point A to B in the most barren and desolate places on earth.
- Get ready to combat the weather, terrain and gravity itself.
- Can you help humanity rebuild or will this task be too much.
Beta of ACT 1 – Antarctica is now available

Tidbits

Following the success of Jedi Fallen Order and the abject failure of Anthem, EA has allowed BioWare to make the next Dragon Age a single-player RPG
- Knowing the history of the franchise it was a bit of a shock to hear that it had previously been planned as an online multiplayer service game, a la Destiny
SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE has been updated on Xbox to support 4k at 120fps on the Series X, and 2k/120fps on the S
- If you haven’t played it already, it’s absolutely worth your time and I’m envious of all those extra frames you’ll see
According to the BBC, parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are being illegally sold through Facebook’s classified ads service, with some plots as large as 1,000 soccer fields and located in national forests and indigenous peoples reserves
- Facebook said it was ready to work with local authorities, but would not take any action on its own
Netflix has launched a new Fast Laughs feature on their app, showcasing scrollable little clips from different shows and comedy specials all formatted vertically to remind you what they have to offer in the age of TikTok
Anyone using the Mail app on macOS should check out MailTrackerBlocker, a plugin that strips out a good majority of spy pixels in marketing emails that feed information about your email interaction back to marketers like if/when you open an email, as well as your location and what device you’re using
- https://apparition47.github.io/MailTrackerBlocker/

Mini Review- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Just getting in to it and it’s fantastic
Feels very challenging, but once the combat starts to click it’s so satisfying
Feels much more directly skill-based than other Souls games where you might just come back later with better equipment
Had a moment where I was stalking the rooftops jumpkilling people when someone actually noticed my shadow and alerted everyone

Would you like to know more?

The full story behind the Justice League Snyder Cut, warts and all
- https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/02/the-true-story-of-justice-league-snyder-cut

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And talk to us in the comments!

PS2J 336 News – Junk Mail to Win

February 26, 2021
Tagged as: 2020, 4K, action, Adventure, Alan, amp, Anime, anthem, app store, Apple, Australia, back into the ashes, breed, Bungie, cancelled, CD Projekt Red, cinematic universe, class-action, companions, controller, covid, creature, Cyberpunk 2077, damages, delay, doom eternal, Dragon Age, dualsense, Epic Games, exploration, Facebook, final fantasy xiv, first riddle, founder, FPS, frames per second, Free Games, from the ashes, funimation, gmail, Google, Government, hack, haptic, Harry Potter, headset, hello games, hmd, id software, information, infrastructure, Internet, iOS, Josh, Journey, label, Law, Link, Marvel, Mass Effect, mcu, motion, nathan drake collection, news, next, No Mans Sky, patch, pay, permadeath, phoenix, play at home, Playstation, premier, preorder, Privacy, professor layton, ps+, PS4, PS4 Pro, ps5, PSVR, puzzle, Ratchet and Clank, Red Dead Redemption 2, resolution, roguelike, RPG, scarlet witch, Sci-Fi, science fiction, sean murray, Shooter, Sony, source code, spoilers, stadia, steamship, Streaming<, sunless sea, survival, the academy, third person, tracking, train, triggers, Twitch, Twitter, Uncharted, underwater, vision, VR, wakanim, wanda maximoff, wandavision, website, Xbox One X

Free Games

Twitch
- The Academy: First Riddle
  - 2020
  - Adventure puzzle game along the lines of the Professor Layton series, with modernized Harry Potter style aesthetics
Epic Games
- Sunless Sea
  - 2015
  - Survival / exploration RPG with roguelike elements that has you piloting an underwater steamship as a captain whose background, ambitions, and victory conditions are customizable, but you have to contend with procedurally generated maps and permadeath
Bonus round: Sony’s announced the return of their Play At Home program, kicking off four months of Playstation offers on March 1st
- First introduced last April when they gave away Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey to everyone, not just PS+ members
- This time around we’ll see Ratchet and Clank (PS4) for free during the month of March
  - 2016
  - Reimagining of the original PS2 game, a third person science fiction action adventure shooter with a lot of weird, over the top weapons, solid writing, and great gameplay
- And then on March 25th they’ll be offering an extended free trial of the Funimation and Wakanim anime streaming services
- Those are just the first couple of perks, so we’ll make sure to give you updates as we see them

Australia’s working on a law that would require any site linking to a news publication to pay for the privilege

Going pretty hard against the principles of the open internet, from what I understand the proposed law would require sites like Google and Facebook to pay news sites for the ability to host links to them
- Keep in mind, this is just linking. Google’s AMP pages and other ways of getting around ad revenue aside, vanilla links are the backbone of the internet
The most bonkers part of this law is that news sites could create their own Facebook pages, link to their news sites, and then charge Facebook for the link
I can’t imagine this law getting passed in its current form, but Google has already started making deals to pay for the links and though Facebook initially fought back (yay Facebook, is a phrase I never thought I’d say), they walked their position back and started quietly making deals too

There’s a proposed class action lawsuit in play alleging that Google lied about Stadia’s capabilities in order to lock in subscribers

The suit claims that, when it was first announced in 2019 Google, Bungie, and id Software misled gamers by claiming that the cloud-based gaming service was more powerful than the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro combined, and that every game on Stadia would be playable at 4k resolutions
Directly prior to launch Google apparently quietly walked back those claims, particularly for people with slower internet connections
- Apparently there was even a Twitter announcement about Red Dead Redemption 2 specifying that users didn’t need high speed internet for 4k/60fps, which was later deleted
- The suit says that because of the earlier inflated specs Google was able to lock in a large customer base through preorders for its subscription service, essentially hooking gamers into being beta testers before the later free release in 2020
The plaintiff is seeking monetary damages for current and former Stadia subscribers, as well as a court order requiring Google to publicly display the resolution and FPS of each game they sell on Stadia

Sony’s announced some details on their next-generation VR headset, and it sounds pretty slick

They’ll be bringing features from their excellent DualSense controller to the new motion controllers
It will apparently connect to the PS5 using a single cord
They say it will have an enhanced field of view, tracking, input, and resolution
But it won’t be out any time this year
My thoughts
- Haptic triggers would be really cool in VR, and better tracking would be a godsend for the platform after they used the old PS3 technology in the first gen, but the freedom of wireless VR is a hard perk to give up. They’re going to have to work hard to make it worthwhile

Everyone hoping for Anthem to join the ranks of No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XIV and rise from its ashes can now stop holding their breath- it’s officially cancelled

Bioware released a statement this week letting everyone know that they’ve stopped development work on Anthem NEXT, citing the additional pressures of 2020 impacting their productivity and preventing them from doing everything they had planned
- Honestly though, it just seems like they bit off more than they could chew and they’re cutting their losses on Anthem. It had a ton of potential, but I’m sure their other titles are just a higher priority based on the amount of money they can pull in.
Anthem’s current live service is still up and running, but the improvements that have been teased won’t be released to the general public while the developers focus instead on the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles

This Week In Gaming History

February 20 – 2003 – Train Tracking – Windows

Train Tracking is a game about one of Britain’s more bizarre past-times, Trainspotting.
- You start the game with only an overhead view of the station and a list of serial numbers.
- The point of the game is to check them off as the matching train passes through.
- For each Day (Day is the name for a level in this game, there’s totally 29) you play the number of serials and tracks to view increase.
- There is a time limit for this and if you fail three times it’s game over.
There’s over 2500 random train stations, with five settings (Country, Town and City Stations, Industrial Depots and Express Bonus Rounds) meaning that each round will different from the other.
- The game has the typical British weather condition of rain, snow and lightning.

February 21 – 2017 – Halo Wars 2 – Xbox One, Windows

Halo Wars 2 is a real-time strategy game based on the Halo universe and it is the sequel to the 2009 Halo Wars.
- Players use Spartans, Warthogs and other classic Halo units in order to battle the enemy.
- A single-player campaign and online multiplayer battles are available.
- The campaign consists of twelve missions and can also be played cooperatively.
- Typical mission objectives include surviving waves of enemies, defending structuring and capturing specific targets.
- There are also various side objectives.
- Many missions involve leading Spartan supersoldier units as well.
The game once again relies on two factions and is now set in the year 2559.
- On the one hand there is the human faction United Nations Space Command (UNSC) and on the other a new alien faction called the Banished, replacing the Covenant from the first game.
- Both factions have leader units with special abilities tied to a cooldown period.
- These abilities can mass heal or do a lot of damage in a short time.
- In multiplayer there are multiple game modes for up to six players online or bots.

February 22 – 1996 – Johnny Bazookatone – PlayStation, Sega Saturn, 3DO, DOS

The original guitar hero with the Elvis attitude and purple hair pompadour, Johnny Bazookatone, has been imprisoned in the year 2050 in Sin Sin Prison by El Diablo, the Lord of the Underworld, who is jealous of his talent and kidnaps other musical legends as well in this 3D side-scrolling platformer.
- Johnny’s guitar Anita has been taken from him and he sets out to escape and vanquish foes on his way to be reunited with Anita.
He can perform moves such as 360-degree spin jumps, and hover jumps among others, while using his bazooka guitar as a weapon.
- When powered up, it can emit a special sonic blast that fries anything within hearing range.
- As you make your way through the demonic levels such as Hotel Demonique, Hell’s Kitchen, and Mr. Diablo’s fiery Penthouse, you can acquire more weapons, power-ups and find secret passages that lead to bonus levels.
- The game’s soundtrack includes the title track contributed by Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora and Tico Torres.

February 23 – 1995 – Mario’s Game Gallery – DOS, Macintosh, Windows

The game is a collection of board games, in which you play with Mario.
- The Mario, of Super Mario fame.
- He talks to you, playing Checkers, Go Fish, Dominoes, Backgammon, Yacht.
- Most of games can be played for Yoshis or Koopas – tribes of animals.

February 24 – 2015 – Dragon Ball: Xenoverse – PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE revisits famous battles from the series through your custom Avatar, who fights alongside Trunks and many other characters.
- Will the strength of this partnership be enough to intervene in fights and restore the Dragon Ball timeline we know?
- New features include the mysterious Toki Toki City, new gameplay mechanics, new character animations and many other amazing features to be unveiled soon!

February 25 – 2002 – Circus Maximus – PS2, Xbox

Circus Maximus is a racing game that takes place in ancient Rome, and as such you’ll be racing chariots around various tracks, including the famed Colliseum.
You’ll be in control of both the driver and your partner, the warrior, whose job is to attack the other racers to make them fall over.
Chariots are controlled by whipping horses and trying to balance an on-screen meter that keeps your chariot balanced while taking turns fast.
There are four different race modes available; Training, which gives you the basics on how to play, Arcade, which is your standard race, Multiplayer, which lets you face off against three friends (or foes), and Career, which tracks your progress over a period of time.
There are seven different environments and 19 tracks, all set throughout the Roman Empire.
Each course is littered with obstacles, power ups, weapons, and special moves, designed to give you an edge in combat.

February 26 – 2008 – Turning Point: Fall of Liberty – PS3, Windows, Xbox 360

Winston Churchill was struck by a taxicab in 1931.
- What if he had died and without his leadership, Britain fell to the Nazis along with the rest of Europe?
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is an alternate-history first-person shooter in which the player takes the role of a New York construction worker named Dan Carson in 1953, when the German Reich invades and occupies the American East Coast.
- He joins the National Guard troops trying to put up a defensive perimeter around subway and railway systems so civilians can escape.
Many advanced WWII weapons appear, including some that were under research, and some that never appeared.
- There are super-heavy tanks such as the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus and Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, and also the Nachteule troop-transport zeppelin, the Flugzeugträger aircraft-carrier zeppelin, as well as various advanced jet fighters and bombers, all used by the German invasion force.
- Multiplayer is available in standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes on 4 maps, with Nazi soldiers versus the American Resistance to a maximum of 8 players.

Tidbits

No Man’s Sky: Companions is yet another free update for the game, bringing us the ability to adopt, train, and breed creatures, on top of improvements to the UI and load times
Google’s finally started updating their iOS apps, updating the App Store listings with the new required privacy information
- There aren’t any real surprises, but when you see in writing that your email client is gathering information about your purchases and location I can see people starting to look for alternatives
CD Projekt Red has officially delayed the release of the anticipated patch 1.2 for Cyberpunk 2077, after the cyber attack we reported on a couple weeks ago wreaked havoc on their infrastructure
- The patch, set to include numerous fixes and quality improvements, is now being aimed at the second half of March

Mini-review

If you’re not watching WandaVision already, you should be
- Starring Scarlet Witch and Vision from the MCU
Completely unexpected but the pilot was charming and the plot got its hooks into me early
If you like the MCU at all you need to be watching

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PS2J News 332 – Track or Not To Track

January 29, 2021
Tagged as: action, Adventure, advertising, afro-brazilian, Alan, algo bot, antitrust, app, app store, Apple, aristocats, Art, asia, awe, bug, burger brawl, cdpr, China, colony, concrete genie, condemnation, control, controversy, Conversation, Cyberpunk 2077, dandara, data, destruction allstars, Disney Plus, DLC, dumbo, Edmonton, emperor’s tomb, Epic Games, expansion, exploit, extreme condition, Facebook, federal bureau of control, foundation, Free, Free Games, free to play, game pass, Gears 5, Gold, Google, Graffiti, greykey, hack, hiss, Indiana Jones, iOS, iPadOS, Josh, Lawsuit, learn, little big workshop, locust, lost planet, lost planet 2, managment, manufacturing, membership, messaging, metroidvania, Microsoft, mod, nazi, negative, nintendo, One, paint, pan-african flag, Paranormal, peter pan, platformer, Playstation, price, Privacy, problematic, programming, ps plus, PS4, ps5, puzzle, raccoon city, racism, Reality, remaster, Resident Evil, reverse, robot, s.t.a.r.s., sale, sandbox, save file, security, series, ship, Shooter, simulation, Smash Bros, Sony, stereotypes, stories matter, support, survival horror, tabletop, terraforming, the lady and the tramp, the medium, thermal energy, third person, tools, tracking, transfer, transparency, trials of fear edition, tvos, twisted metal, Twitch, ultimate, ultimate edition, unity, Update, upgrade, vehicular combat, War, warp, watchos, XBox, Xbox Live, xs

Free Games

Twitch
- Algo Bot
  - 2018
  - Puzzle game that has you maintaining a pan-galactic colony ship by managing a cute robot through a visual programming language
- Little Big Workshop
  - 2019
  - Management sim with an open-ended sandbox experience where you start with a small tabletop workshop and expand to a desk-filling factory, running multiple production lines and managing your cute workers
Epic Games
- Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition
  - 2018
  - 2D platformer and Metroidvania based on the Afro-Brazilian warrior of the same name that has you traversing the world by warping between white surfaces
  - Trials of Fear Edition adds a bunch of things like new areas, a new boss, new powers, and a new secret ending
Sony
- Concrete Genie
  - 2019
  - Action-adventure game where you discover a paint brush that can bring your art to life, infusing them with different personalities and powers depending on how you draw them
- Control Ultimate Edition
  - 2020 bundle version of the 2019 release, including the Foundation and AWE expansions, brand new to the PS5 and Xbox Series in February
  - Action-adventure game that revolves around the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret US government agency tasked with containing and studying phenomena that violate the laws of reality. You play as the new director and use your powerful abilities to defeat the deadly Hiss
  - This is a messy one- the developers set it up so that only people that own the Ultimate edition can get a free upgrade to the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, so players that bought it in the first year of release are left out in the cold
    - They also stated that save files could be brought forward to the latest consoles from the original release if you bought Ultimate Edition on the last-generation consoles, but just yesterday they announced that there is actually no way to bring your old save file to the next-gen consoles
    - Now Ultimate Edition is being made free on PS4 and PS5 two weeks after it was just on sale, but unlike ManEater they aren’t offering any refunds for people that jumped on the deal, even if they haven’t booted it up yet while waiting for the PS5 release
- Destruction AllStars
  - Brand new 2021
  - Vehicular combat game billed as a “global sports entertainment event where stars & cars collide”, where each hero vehicle has different abilities and once your car has been destroyed you need to survive on foot
Microsoft
- Gears 5
  - 2019 optimized for the Xbox Series
  - Third-person shooter that takes place months after the events of Gears of War 4 that has you uncovering the origins of the Locust and the truth behind your family history
- Resident Evil
  - 2015 HD remaster of the 1996 release
  - Survival horror game that helped define the genre, where you play a member of the elite task force S.T.A.R.S as they investigate the outskirts of Raccoon City following the disappearance of your team members
- Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition (also on Epic)
  - 2018
  - 2D platformer and Metroidvania based on the Afro-Brazilian warrior of the same name that has you traversing the world by warping between white surfaces
  - Trials of Fear Edition adds a bunch of things like new areas, a new boss, new powers, and a new secret ending
- Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb
  - 2003
  - Action-adventure game that has you taking the role of Indy as he travels to 1935 China to prevent a powerful artifact from falling into evil hands, pitting you against evil Nazis and the Asian underworld
- Lost Planet 2
  - 2010
  - Third-person shooter set 10 years after Lost Planet: Extreme Condition where terraforming efforts have started to change the face of the planet but mankind is still locked in a civil war for thermal energy

Apple’s released updates for pretty much all of their devices except for Mac, including bug fixes, security updates for vulnerabilities that may have been exploited in the wild, and a new Unity watchface inspired by the Pan-African flag

Some people online think the security updates may be related to the GreyKey iPhone hacking device, but we have yet to see any solid reports
Related to the new watchface, as part of Black History Month Apple has also introduced a limited-edition “Black Unity” Apple Watch and sport band, using the colours of the Pan-African flag and inscribed with messages like “Black Unity”, and “Truth. Power. Solidarity.”
- They also have plans to use their apps like Maps and Music to spotlight Black businesses, musicians, developers, writers, influencers, and news stories

Facebook is apparently preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for an unfair approach to privacy and default apps

Facebook is claiming that the App Tracking Transparency features, allowing users to opt-out of being tracked, are unfair because they don’t appear for Apple’s built-in apps
- The problem here is that Apple doesn’t track users or share data for advertising purposes, so it doesn’t really apply
Facebook will apparently also be focusing on Apple’s refusal to allow other messaging apps to be set as the system default, claiming that limitation is an effort to prevent people from switching to competing brands
- I’m sure this has nothing to do with them lobbying Apple in September to allow Facebook Messenger to be the default messaging app and being soundly rejected
The big bullet point here seems to be that Facebook’s accusing Apple of making changes to line their own pockets, while the reality seems to be that all Apple’s doing here is giving us control over how Facebook monetizes us
We’ll have to see if these actions actually get filed, but a lot of it just seems like an tantrum because Facebook will have to start asking permission before harvesting data from iPhone users

In related news, Google is actually pulling the tracking features from their iOS apps

Many of Google’s apps still have yet to submit their data privacy labels to the App Store, which will show what data they’re gathering, but in the meantime they’ve announced that rather than ask users to allow themselves to be tracked Google will instead remove tracking altogether
Google’s warned that app developers may see a “significant impact” to their Google ad revenue on iOS after the new policy takes effect, but if tracking is so important to their business then they could always leave it in and use the permissions prompt to justify it to their users
The fact that they’d rather stop than ask permission is pretty dang telling

Microsoft revealed plans to double the price of Xbox Live Gold this week, drawing so much fire that they reversed course 15 hours later

In their planned rollout their cheapest option would have stayed at $60, but cut down to 6 months instead of the current 12
The prevailing theory is that this change would have been to push more people toward Game Pass Ultimate, which offers the benefits of Gold with the Game Pass subscription service that’s pretty solid but not necessarily for everyone
On the plus side, now instead of doubling the price of Gold they’re keeping prices as-is and also making changes for free-to-play games to allow them online without a Gold membership
So it at least shows that they’re open to criticism and willing to make their services a little better instead of much worse

Disney’s making changes to its Disney+ lineup as part of their Stories Matter initiative, an effort to reckon with the company’s history of racist stereotypes and negative depictions

Several titles with problematic content like Peter Pan, Aristocats, The Lady and the Tramp, and Dumbo, have been removed from profiles set up for children, though they can still be viewed from regular accounts
When watched they also display a strong condemnation of their contents, saying that the stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now, acknowledging the harmful impact, and saying they want to learn from it and spark conversation so that parents can make sure their children have a good mental framework in which to place these movies
Conversations about race and stereotypes aren’t easy to have with kids, but you can’t just throw those types of racist caricatures at impressionable minds willy-nilly without doing some harm in the process

This Week In Gaming History 2000’s Edition!

January 23 – 2001 – The Typing Of The Dead – Sega Dreamcast (North America)

This is essentially the same game as the arcade light-gun rail-shooter House of the Dead 2, except they’ve turned it into a edu-tainment typing trainer.
- Instead of guns, your characters have keyboards strapped to them, and instead of shooting the zombies that constantly jump out at you you’ll need to type out the words attached to the zombies in order to kill them before they crack open your head and feast upon the goo inside.
- The game ranks you on your typing speed and provides various tutorials and other edu-tainment sundries.
Otherwise it’s pretty much the same game as House of the Dead 2.
- Much like the Resident Evil series, the zombie hordes have gone from infesting a vaguely gothic creepy old mansion to infesting a vaguely gothic decaying city, and its your job to stop them and save the human race (as usual).

January 24 – 2000 – Crazy Taxi – Sega Dreamcast (United States)

Crazy Taxi is an arcade-like racer where the player takes the role of a taxi driver who weaves his way through crowded streets, across sidewalks, and even underwater, in a wild and frantic race to deliver passengers on time.
- The courses are largely set inside cities crowded with general traffic and pedestrians (which can’t be run over, they dive away).
- The main goal is to bring as many customers as possible to their destination in time.
- Available customers are marked through circles and the color represents the distance and the fare they offer.
- Green means long rides with plenty of money, and red ones are very short.
In the main Arcade mode, there is a timer that quickly runs down.
- It can be replenished by picking up customers.
- While driving reckless maneuvers are encouraged.
- Players can disregard all traffic rules and customers give extra tips for speedy and dangerous driving, but these can only be cashed when the customer arrives at his destination in time.
- By the same token, the reward at the end of a ride is based on the amount of time left, as each customer also has a personal timer.
- The city is filled with slopes and jumps, and the game uses a very loose driving model.
- No damage can be done to the car, so driving as fast as possible is encouraged.
- While driving players can toy with the gears to perform two special tricks: a crazy drift and a crazy boost to speed up more quickly.
Next to the Arcade mode, there is an Original mode and Crazy Box where specific goals need to be met on closed down courses.
- In the regular modes, it is possible to disregard the usual timer and play for a fixed amount of minutes.
- At the end of the race, the player is rewarded with a license, either D, C, B or A, with S for outstanding performance.
- Next to the interactive courses from the arcade version, there is a new course for home consoles.
- There are four cabs and drivers to choose from.
- The cars have different statistics and the drivers’ different attitudes while racing.
- The game has a soundtrack featuring The Offspring and Bad Religion (not for the Xbox 360 version).

January 25 – 2005 – Playboy: The Mansion – PS2, Windows, Xbox

Live the life of Hugh Hefner in this “Virtual Hef” simulation.
As a young Hugh Hefner, it is the player’s goal to build the Playboy empire through sexy parties and putting together Playboy magazine every month.
- Build friendships and business contacts with celebrities, political figures, musicians, sports stars and more through hosting events and charming over people.
On the business side, Hef has to hire a staff to take photos and write articles for the magazine.
- The “Playboy Photoshoot” mode allows the player to take the role of photographer.
- On the personal side, invite friends into your inner circle, and find a girlfriend… or two…. or more.
- The better the parties Hef throws, the more fame he gets, as well as more interesting people to fill the magazine.
- More money means a larger staff, and more items (toys and furniture) for Hef to display in the Mansion.
Doing well in the game earns Hef points which can be used to purchase extra features, such as cheats and archive photos of Hef and past issue covers.

January 26 – 2003 – Devil May Cry 2 – PlayStation 2

Devil May Cry 2 is the sequel to Devil May Cry and once again casts you as Dante, the demon slayer.
You control Dante as you battle demons through various levels, ultimately reaching the conclusion and to find out just why these demons are trying to kill everyone.
- To aid you in your quest, you once again have your trusty sword and various attributes, as well as new moves, like running on walls, aerial kicks, and multi-directional shooting.
This time around, Dante is not alone, as you have a partner, named Lucia.
- Just as much of an asskicker as Dante, Lucia utilizes a kind of knife which she can rapidly throw at her enemies.
All the special skills from the first game are here, again activated by your Devil Trigger, which has been improved for the sequel’s release.

January 27 – 2004 – Cops 2170: The Power of Law – Windows

COPS 2170 is a tactical strategy game of squad combat with RPG elements set in a futuristic cyberpunk world.
- It is a prequel to Paradise Cracked, an earlier game by the same company.
In the game you control Katy, a new officer fresh from the academy that aims to make a solid career in the police force.
- You will control her as your main character and recruit additional partners to undertake several missions, which usually involve combat across the urban sprawls of the future against several factions and gangs in the city.
- As the game progresses a plot starts to surface involving a deranged criminal who aims to bring the city to its knees.
You can control up to 6 characters and additional backup NPCs, each with their own stats and equipment and issue orders to them on squad-based turns.
- Since you are part of the police force there’s no resource management and instead the equipment availability is decided by your rank, which depends on the conditions in which you complete each mission.
- The game uses a fully polygonal engine and features branching mission objectives and different outcomes based on your in-game actions.

January 28 – 2003 – Black & Bruised – GameCube, PlayStation 2

Black & Bruised is a cartoonish take on boxing with 18 different boxers, each with their own personality and fighting style.
- There are five different modes including multi-player, exhibition, and a story mode told with CG with each boxer’s life story is played out in story mode.
- Each boxer has a different special attack and power-ups can be picked up to use in matches.
- There are 30 different facial expressions for each boxer reacting to punches and misses giving them a life-like appearance.

January 29 – 2001 – Oni – Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 2

Plot:
- It’s 2032.
- The planet is now ruled by the World Coalition Government which annexed 80% of the countries, with the remaining quickly dragged into the WCG.
- While their official goal was to solve humankind’s problems, it was about money.
- Massive spending bankrupted poorer countries, and soon all traces of individual government disappeared.
- For those who were poor, the situation didn’t improved one bit, and for the richer, maintaining the status was done at the expense of their privacy and personal freedoms.
- To make things worse, life outside the major cities, far from the atmosphere processors is nearly impossible, as the so-called “Wilderness Preserves” are poisoned, and those who venture into them risk a painful death.
- Konoko, fresh out from TCTF (Technology Crimes Task Force, a secret police to take cyber drugs and weapons from the streets, as well as explore the induced technophobia to operate and investigate on a blank check permission) academy is placed under the command of Terrance Griffin and Dr. Kerr and linked to a SLD – an android – called Shinatama, who is neurally linked to her.
- However, Konoko knows next to nothing about her past, other that she was orphaned at the age of three and felt “different” to other people while was being brought up under the wing of TCTF.
- After many years in training, she has finally the chance to prove herself to Griffin and the TCTF, and so, heads for a warehouse rumoured to be under the control of the Syndicate, a criminal organization which grew exponentially after a young man called “Boss Muro” climbed to the top of the organization.
Inspired by the classic Anime series Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Masamune, gameplay is a mix between generic third-person shooter and a classic beat’em up.
- While Konoko has at her disposal several hand-to-hand acrobatic moves (with more unlocked as the player advances), she can also find weapons in the levels, and the decision to go armed or bare-fisted is only up to the player.
- Each weapon either draws from ballistic or energy cell clips, the number of rounds in each clip depending on the weapon: a Black Adder (a short, one-hand machine gun like an Uzi) can get 30 rounds from a ballistic clip, while a Mercury Bow (a sniper railgun sans scope) only two.
- Combined with the limited availability of clips, this adds a strategic element to the game, as the player can only carry a weapon at a time, so if a powerful weapons runs out of ammo, the player must choose between keeping the weapon and fight hand to hand with the enemies until Konoko finds fresh ammo clips, or discard it for a lesser gun that uses different ammo.
- However, if the player runs out of ammo completely when facing a tough challenge, Konoko can “overdose” on hypo sprays (used to heal damage) by using them over her natural health bar, which provides her with faster movement and tougher blows.

Tidbits

Reddit took to the stock market this week to inflate the price of stocks like GameStop in order to stick it to hedge funds that have been banking on the prices dropping soon
- It got to the point where trading had to be frozen multiple times, and the popular trading app RobinHood took the potentially illegal position that their users are now no longer allowed to buy those stocks, only sell
- Because of this multiple government officials from both sides of the aisle, including AOC and Ted Cruz, have called for an investigation and potential sanctions against RobinHood
CDPR has released modding support tools for Cyberpunk 2077, with promises to keep them up to date as patches continue being developed, so we should hopefully see some interesting things added to Night City as time goes on
In local news, Edmonton has a new Smash Bros inspired burger joint called Burger Brawl, that has two chefs pitting burgers against each other elimination-style each weekend with new challengers announced each Thursday. Check them out at burgerbrawl.ca

Looking forward to playing The Medium this weekend

The Medium is a psychological horror game played in third-person as Marianne, a medium who can travel into the spirit realm.
- Being able to inhabit both worlds aids puzzle solving.
- Her psychic abilities may also be used against hostile forces and are recharged by interacting with energy spots called spirit wells.
The Medium is developed by Bloober Team, who came up with the idea in 2012.
- Bloober meant to enhance the immersion by changing their traditional perspective from first- to third-person and taking advantage of Xbox Series X/S’s background streaming.
- They modelled the supernatural setting after Zdzisław Beksiński’s dystopian surrealist artwork.
- Lead designer Wojciech Piejko said The Medium imparts the message that “there is no universal truth”.
- Composers Arkadiusz Reikowski and Akira Yamaoka were tasked with scoring the physical and spiritual plane, respectively.
- Using synthesiser and analogue sounds, Reikowski likened his approach to that of Stranger Things and Chernobyl.
- Yamaoka worked on the Silent Hill franchise, which inspired the game, including its fixed camera angles.
- He was persuaded to take on the music when Piejko gave him a gameplay demonstration. Singer Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, also of Silent Hill fame, will contribute vocals.
- Troy Baker voices the primary antagonist, known as the Maw, for whom another actor performed the motion capture on stilts.
The Medium was originally announced for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U in 2012, but for want of better technology, reappeared in May 2020 as a Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X/S title.
- Originally scheduled for 10 December 2020, the release was eventually delayed to 28 January 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic

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PS2J 330 News – Modern Gaming Art

January 15, 2021
Tagged as: 3D, 4chan, action, advertising, AI, Alan, Amazon, amplifier, Apple, ar, assassin’s creed, augmented reality, battlefield, battlefront II, Bethesda, block, brink bionics, Brotherhood of Steel, bug fix, cd projekt, celebration edition, Censorship, ces 2021, chair, click, coldsnap, collar, console, content, customization, Cyberpunk 2077, daring fireball, data, development, DLC, dog, EA, Epic Games, extremist, Facebook, fallen order, Fallout, far cry 3, first amendment, First Person, Free, Free Games, funding, Galaxy, Gamecube, games, Google, Gundam, hbcu, heads up display, hud, illegal, improvement, impulse neuro-controller, Indiana Jones, Internet, Josh, keurig, learning, lg, license, lucasfilm, Mac, machinegames, Mario Party, mask, massive entertainment, Mobile Suit, monitor, mouse, n95, nazi, Net Neutrality, nintendo 64, north idaho, Obsidian, open-world, ouya, panasonic, parler, PC, petpuls, Play Station, Playstation, port, Privacy, project brooklyn, project hazel, provider, PS4, ps5, quibi, racial equity and justice initiative, Razer, reji, release, republic commando, Resident Evil 4, respawn, Revelations, right-wing, roku, rolling display, s pen, s21, safe, Samsung, scroll, security, sharing, Shooter, smart glasses, soft-serve, South Park, squadrons, Star Wars, stream, terms of service, terrorist, That Dragon Cancer, the division, third person, threat, Tiger Woods, Titanfall, todd howard, tom clancy, Twitter, twitter for iphone, Ubisoft, ultra, Update, violence, vuzix, warning, WhatsApp, Windows, Wolfenstein, Xbox One, xbox series, your t1 wifi, Zaku, Zeon

Free games

Epic Games
- Star Wars Battlefront II: Celebration Edition
  - 2017
  - Third and first person action shooter followup to the Battlefront reboot of 2015 that has you fighting on the ground and among the stars across a variety of maps in the Star Wars universe, with both the multiplayer Battlefield-style gameplay we’re used to in the series as well as a single-player campaign
  - The Celebration Edition bundles it along with a large collection of aesthetic customization content that was available through in-game purchase, all the way from launch up to and including The Rise of Skywalker

CES 2021 highlights

Razer showed off Project Hazel, clear futuristic face masks that qualify as N95 respirators, have a good silicone liner to prevent leakage or foggy glasses, and amplify your voice to help keep speech from sounding muffled
They also have the Project Brooklyn gaming chair, a bucket seat with an integrated keyboard tray and 60” curved display for more immersion
Panasonic has an AR HUD system for vehicles that use eye tracking and projected images on the windshield to show an intelligent overlay including alerts and directions lined up with real-world objects
LG showcased their new rollable display tech, leading to scroll-like devices with a thick rounded edge and an adjustable display size
Brink Bionics has the Impulse Neuro-Controller, a glove that can detect your intention to click your mouse 80ms before your finger moves
ColdSnap wants to be the Keurig of ice cream, aiming to provide pod-based soft-serve made to order in under 120 seconds
Petpuls is an AI driven smart dog collar that will decipher up to five different emotions (happy, anxious, angry, sad, relaxed) and track your pet’s activity and sleep
And Vuzix has some microLED smart glasses that actually look like something humans would wear, with the added benefit of cellular connectivity, noise-cancelling microphones, stereo audio, and a 3D HUD shown across both lenses

Lucasfilm Games is shifting their entire development strategy, opening the doors to more studios and ending EA’s monopoly on the Star Wars IP

The first big news to come from this is that they’re collaborating with Ubisoft on a story-driven open-world Star Wars game, which will be led by Massive Entertainment
- You might have seen their name on things like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Far Cry 3, and Tom Clancy’s The Division 1/2
They went on to say that their relationship with EA isn’t completely ending though, which makes sense after the great success of Star Wars: Squadrons, and the middling success of Fallen Order
- This is some good news for Reddit commenters who brought up a great point- why hasn’t Respawn taken their Titanfall chops and made a Republic Commando title?
- Though that just reminds me how the Clone Wars TV show put a hard stop on the Republic Commando / Imperial Commando books, and makes me a little sad
But on to more hope- apparently Lucasfilm Games will also be working with Todd Howard, MachineGames (the team behind the new Wolfenstein titles), and Bethesda on an upcoming Indiana Jones title as well!
I’m really looking forward to what Lucasfilm kicking their gaming division into gear will mean for the next few years of releases

CD Projekt’s co-founder released an explanation this week of exactly what happened with Cyberpunk 2077’s development and release

In the video statement he defended the development teams and said that the decisions lay solely on his and the board’s shoulders, and promised they would work to regain the trust of gamers
Apparently the game was initially developed for PC and then ported to consoles, which led to many of the issues running on PS4 and Xbox One as they underestimated the difficulty of the port
- And the big reason why review keys for console weren’t sent out until right before release was just because they were still working hard trying to iron out all the issues that they had found
The path forward
- More updates are coming with bug fixes, updates and improvements
- Once the biggest fixes are out they’ll be releasing free DLC packs aimed at the first half of the year, and the PS5 and Xbox Series optimization updates in the second half
So all told we should have the Cyberpunk we were hoping for before the end of 2021, which is something at least. Whether people will start trusting the developers again will remain to be seen

Citing concerns over censorship, a North Idaho internet provider blocked Facebook and Twitter this week

For anyone who isn’t aware, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump from their platforms due to violations of their terms of service after he incited a riot that invaded the US capitol building in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results
- Keep in mind that this is completely legal, and that the First Amendment only protects speech from being limited by the government
According to emails sent by “Your T1 WIFI” to its customers the ISP determined that this was censorship of their customers and information, so they decided to block access to the sites as of Wednesday
- Your T1 WIFI stated that about 2/3 of its customers had called in asking the sites to be blocked because of these concerns, so the next logical step was to censor block the sites from all customers
They’ve since walked back the decision and made it an opt-in process instead, but the damage may already be done- a spokesperson for the Washington Governor’s office said that the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division would be looking in to the matter because of Net Neutrality violations, which forbid broadband internet providers from blocking lawful content and services

In related news, the right-wing social media site Parler has gone dark after being pulled from not only the Apple and Google app stores but also the Amazon web hosting services that the site was running on

Apparently Parler was basically chock full of nazis, radical extremists, and terrorists, with much of the content focused on inciting and coordinating violence or other illegal activity
- Daring Fireball described it as “4chan with rightwing celebrity endorsements”
- For example Parler investor Dan Bongino, a Fox News commentator and former NYPD police officer, said in a Parler post that the company was “not done with Apple and Google” and encouraged users to “Stay tuned to hear what’s coming.” One user replied: “It would be a pity if someone with explosives training were to pay a visit to some AWS Data Centers – the location of which are public knowledge.”
All of this went against the terms of service of the various platforms it was connected to, so therefore it was kicked out even after being given warnings and deadlines in which to implement some kind of moderation plan
- As it turns out, Parler was actually even in direct violation of its own terms of service
Some have taken to screaming first amendment and censorship, but I cannot stress this enough- freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences
And those consequences will be coming- apparently in the wake of the US Capitol riot a researcher began archiving every Parler post to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through
- Hacker @donk_enby pulled dozens of terabytes of content, including raw unprocessed photos and videos that include metadata like the exact GPS coordinates at which they were recorded

This Week In Gaming History

January 9 – 2000 – Mario Party 2 – N64 (North America)

Mario and a range of well known Nintendo characters, including Yoshi, Bowser, Luigi, and Wario return for some more party action.
The second edition includes 5 new boards, each with a specific theme, such as Space Land, Western Land, Horror Land, and Mystery Land.
- Each board includes unique attributes in relation to the theme, but the main goal is the same: complete the board game over a certain amount of moves and be the player to have the most coins and/or stars at the end.
The single player story mode allows one person and 3 CPU controlled players to play each board.
- Once you play a specific mini-game (64 in all), they become available to purchase using the coins you collected in your games to play anytime.
- Multiplayer allows 2 to 4 people to play the game.

January 10 – 1997 – Obsidian – Windows

The plot of this Myst-influenced 5 CD adventure game involves issues such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
- Fortunately, the bundled strategy guide explains the basics of these subjects.
- Gameplay is linear and largely based around puzzles.
Obsidian’s had an imaginative advertisement campaign.
- Combining both printed ads as well as television spots, the campaign was unusual as it portrayed several common situations twisted in a way that defied all laws of physics, nature and logic followed by the tagline “Your rules do not apply here”.
  - For example: a printed ad showing an empty room lit by an overhead lamp, only the lamp produces darkness instead of light.
- Yet the most impressive ad was the famed “egg” TV spot, which featured a guy dropping an egg to the floor with unexpected results.
- This commercial became a particular object of cult among publicity buffs and won 3 Gold Clio awards and became a permanent feature on the New York Museum of Modern Art, as well as being a regular on TV commercial specials, and a runner-up for a Cannes Golden Lion award.

January 11 – 2005 – Resident Evil 4 – GameCube

Plot:m
- Picking up six years after Resident Evil 2, the fourth game in the series follows former cop (now US agent) Leon S. Kennedy to Europe on a top secret mission to investigate the disappearance of the president’s daughter Ashley.
- As Leon encounters unimaginable horrors, he must find out who or what is behind everything.
- Old friends…and enemies…lurk around every corner as Leon attempts to find out who is truly behind the kidnapping of the president’s daughter.
Resident Evil 4 is a major change from the previous installments.
- Instead of a fixed third person perspective, the game features a new “behind the back” movement camera angle and an “over the shoulder” aiming feature that allows players to control their gun movement for specific body part hits.
- It features a brand new AI system and more open environments that allow enemies to work together to capture and corner Leon.
- Enemies are now humans, which allows them to climb up ladders, open doors, and use weapons throughout the game.
The entire item system has also been revamped, so that smaller items no longer require an entire item space to hold.
- Instead, items take up blocks of space in a briefcase according to their real life size, to allow for many more items and weapons.
- Leon can collect treasure from enemies or from the surrounding area, and visit the infamous “merchant” to purchase bigger briefcases, treasure maps, weapons upgrades, and powerful weapons such as the one-shot RPG.
- There is also the Mercenaries from Resident Evil 3, which allows the player to play survival scenarios as character such as Hunk and even Albert Wesker himself.
Development:
- The earliest version of the game was announced for the PS2 under Resident Evil 2 with director Hideki Kamiya.
- This build was eventually cancelled as a Resident Evil installment and became the title known as Devil May Cry.
- Eventually, development was moved to the Gamecube console and another build emerged.
- This was the first version to feature Leon from RE2. The game’s main menace was to sport a hook on one of its hands, and the logo for the game reflected this (this can still be seen in the final logo).
- More versions were created and cancelled before Shinji Mikami took over and transformed the title into what it is today.
- Of all the builds developed, only one of them was never unveiled to the public (it was the one that was being worked on right before Mikami took over).
- Early in the development stages the game’s setting was Japan, not Europe.

January 12 – 2016 – That Dragon, Cancer – Windows, Mac, Ouya

That Dragon, Cancer is an autobiographical and crowd-funded game created with a small team and based on the experience of the couple Ryan Green and Amy Green, who lost their son Joel Evan Green to cancer.
- The game consists of fourteen interactive sequences that chronicle their time with Joel, incorporating their thoughts and experiences, and voiced by themselves and their other children.
- It represents a love letter to their son and a way to immortalize him.
- Joel was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor when he was twelve months old, leading to terminal cancer, but he went on to live for four more years until he passed away in 2014.
Each scene shows a different moment of their time together with Joel, both the highs and the lows.
- Scenes are often abstract or involve metaphorical interpretations of situations and are played from a first-person or a third-person perspective with small amounts of interaction and exploration.
- Sometimes there are choices for the player or optional parts that can be explored or examined.
- There are scenes at the pond, playing with a duck, in the playground, the hospital and so on.
- Scenes show both the positive moments such as Joel playing or the conversations with the other children, but also the couple when they argue, the moment of the first diagnosis, the conflict between science and faith and so on.
- A part of the crowd-funded contributions also involves messages and art incorporated in the game.
Along with the game, a documentary called Thank You for Playing was filmed, documenting the game’s development and the last years of Joel’s life.
- It was released in 2016. The game was released on what would have been Joel’s seventh birthday.

January 13 – 2004 – Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel – Xbox, PS2

Setting:
- In a post-apocalyptic future, a society known as the Brotherhood of Steel is born, wielding powerful weapons and armor from the time before the war, they seek to bring some form of order to the wastelands of what used to be the United States.
- As a new member(s) to the Brotherhood, you’ll soon find yourself separated from your comrades and forced to contend with a variety of missions and challenges alone.
- Radscorpions, Super-Mutants and Deathclaws are all in the Brotherhood’s way, and bringing an end to their tyranny will certainly make the wasteland a safer place.
Brotherhood of Steel is an action game set in the Fallout universe.
- The Brotherhood members are well armed and carry full clips of ammo (which does run out).
- New weapons of various nature can be found and equipped to bring new tactics.
- Shooting down enemies earns experience points and these points are used to improve the attributes of various individual skills.
- Additionally, your character will have to contend with finding keys and other objects, protecting NPCs and jumping over bottomless pits.
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel features a product placement for the real life Bawls energy drink.
- This may be jarring to fans of the Fallout series, who are used to having Nuka-Cola as the post-apocalyptic drink of choice.
Fan response to this game was so overwhelmingly negative that Interplay actually shut down the official Brotherhood of Steel message board.
- It is so hated by the Fallout fanbase, the game’s section on the No Mutants Allowed forums (one of the biggest Fallout forum) is called: “Fallout: Piece of Shit (PS2, XBOX, My Lower Intestine)”.

January 14 – 1999 – EA pulls Tiger Woods 99 on Playstation for bootlegging South Park

Company recalls PSX version of Tiger Woods 99.
A bootleg episode of Southpark was found on the CD in normally unused space.
The file was only readable via a PC, and was invisible to the PSX console.
Recall was issued since Southpark is offensive to some people.
Roughly 100,000 copies were affected.

January 15 – 2002 – Mobile Suit Gundam: Zeonic Front – PS2

Based on the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series.
- Ride with the bad guys as you battle Earth Federation forces for independence.
- Take control of three mobile suit teams. Use strategy tactics to infiltrate federation bases.
- Use a wide variety of Mobile suits equipped to kill.
- Strategically set your route to carry out mission objectives successfully

Tidbits

Samsung unveiled their new Galaxy S21 series of phones with edge-to-edge display, 120hz refresh rate, and 8K video recording
- The Ultra model also brings a larger display and S Pen functionality for people that miss the Note series
- Unfortunately it looks like not even Samsung staff are that into their hardware, with tweets promoting the release being marked from “Twitter for iPhone”
WhatsApp is now in a rush to reassure people that some of their data is still safe after changing its terms and privacy policy to include significant data sharing with Facebook
- Backlash from those changes saw Signal and Telegram hitting the top of the free app charts on iPhone as people found other options for messaging
- They went out of their way to list the things they don’t share like private messages, call logs, and your location, but doesn’t mention what they do share like device usage, IP address, and unspecified “other information”
Apple announced a set of new major projects this week as part of its $100M Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, to help dismantle systemic barriers to opportunity and combat injustices faced by communities of colour
- This includes an innovation and learning hub both in Atlanta and online, an Apple Developer Academy in Detroit, and venture capital funding for entrepreneur POC’s
Roku has purchased Quibi’s old content library of about 75 shows and documentaries for well under $100M according to the Wall Street Journal, giving them exclusive rights through to the end of the year and shared streaming rights through 2027
- Roku will be offering the content for free with ads, which likely means that a lot more people will see these shows now than would have otherwise

For more content, Patreon supports get access to upcoming ideas and more!

Thank you so much to Dalton. Our longest Patron, we love ya bud, and I hope you are like OMG me? When and if you eventually read this.

And thanks to the rest of our ‘fanily’ that support us.

And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

We are a proud member of the Alberta Podcast Network. Locally grown. Community supported.

And talk to us in the comments!

PS2J 320 News – Gritty Humans and Pretty Anime Folk

October 2, 2020
Tagged as: 4K, 5g, 8-bit, abandoned, action, Adventure, Alan, always home cam, Amazon, antitrust, apocalypse, apology, app store, Apple, apple tv+, autonomous, brawler, breach, butcher’s cut, CD Projekt Red, Chromecast, co-op, Comedy, Comic, compromised, con, contract, court, covid-19, crafting, crunch, Cyberpunk 2077, dark secrets, dead age, developer, dishonest, Disney, DLC, doctor, drone, EA, Egypt, epic, Epic Games, exploration, Facebook, farmville, Festival, First Person, Flash, flight stick, Fortnite, Free Games, game pass, games with gold, Google, Google Home, google play, google tv, guess, Hardware, hearing, heist, Horror, hotas, immersion, iOS, jay and silent bob, Josh, judge, jury, keylogger, kick, killer, lament, Las Vegas, Lawsuit, layers of fear, London, los angeles, magic, mall brawl, mansion, mask, Microsoft, miles morales, movie, multuplayer, mythology, need for speed, nest audio, Netflix, nintendo, painter, parkour, password, payback, payment, pedal, permadeath, pikuniku, Pixel, Playstation, point and click, precautions, ps plus, ps+, ps5, psychological, push, puzzle, quake 3, quickstop, racing, remaster, Retro, reuse, roll, RPG, security, security recommendations, seum, sidescrolling, silver chains, skullface, slasher, slayaway camp, social distancing, Sony, spanish flu, speedrunners from hell, speedrunning, sphinx & the cursed mummy, Spider-Man, squadrons, stadia, Star Wars, story, Streaming<, super meat boy, surf world series, surfing, swing, Switch, the book of unwritten tales 2, third person, threat, throttle, tony hawk, Turn Based, tutankhamen, twitch prime, vampire, vampyr, victorian, voxel, VR, XBox, Xbox Live, YouTube, yvonne gonzalez rogers, Zombie

Free games

Xbox Gold
- The Book of Unwritten Tales 2
  - 2015
  - A comedy point and click adventure game that has you switching between four different protagonists that has you working against a magical force that’s turning beasts into puppies and castles into dollhouses
- Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut
  - 2016
  - A killer puzzle game where you control Skullface, a psycho slasher bent on slaughtering camp counselors at the title campground. Slide an adorable voxel murderer around hundreds of isometric puzzle levels to squash, flay, and decapitate hapless victims in this darkly comic homage to 80s horror.
- Sphinx & the Cursed Mummy
  - 2003
  - Third person action adventure game inspired by the mythology of ancient Egypt where you play both the demi-god Sphinx and the undead mummy Tutankhamen in a combination of combat and puzzle-solving
Ps plus
- Need for Speed: Payback
  - 2017
  - Racing game set in an open-world fictional version of Las Vegas, focused on action driving with three different playable characters working together to pull of action movie like sequences and heists
- Vampyr
  - 2018
  - Action RPG set in Spanish Flu era London where you play Jonathan Reid, a doctor turned vampire torn between the Hippocratic Oath and his newfound bloodthirsty nature
Twitch
- SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell
  - 2016
  - A first-person speedrunning parkour game that plays like a combination Quake 3 and Super Meat Boy with a focus on quick action and reflexes
- Dead Age
  - 2016
  - A zombie apocalypse RPG with turn-based combat and permadeath that has you managing survivors, crafting materials, and making tough choices to defend your camp against the undead
- Surf World Series
  - 2017
  - A single or multiplayer surfing trick game that looks like Tony Hawk on the water
- Layers of Fear
  - 2016
  - A psychological horror game where you control a disturbed painter trying to complete his magnum opus as he navigates through a victorian mansion, with disturbing secrets about the painter being discovered
- Silver Chains
  - 2019
  - First-person horror game with a focus on story and exploration, where you search for clues in an abandoned manor to unravel the truth about the terrible events that occurred
- Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl
  - 2020
  - Retro 8-bit sidescrolling brawler that has Jay and Silent Bob battling their way out of the mall and back to the Quickstop
- Darkside Detective
  - 2017
  - Point and click mystery game that has you solving the dangerous and confusing cases of Twin Lakes, with everything from flesh-hungry tentacles to mafioso zombies in the mix
Epic Games
- Pikuniku
  - 2019
  - Puzzle adventure game that has you getting through levels and solving puzzles by kicking and pushing objects, swinging from your legs, or curling up and rolling around. The game is focused on single player but also has local co-op specific levels

Epic Games vs Apple updates

During a hearing this week with both companies, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers criticized Epic’s decision to breach their contract with Apple in the first place by offering their custom payment system in an attempt to avoid App Store fees
- Apparently Epic claimed that it didn’t pose a security threat to Apple because they’re a well-established company and partner
- Judge Gonzalez Rogers reportedly told Epic “You did something, you lied about it by omission, by not being forthcoming. That’s the security issue. That’s the security issue!” and “There are a lot of people in the public who consider you guys heroes for what you guys did, but it’s still not honest.”
- She was also not particularly persuaded by Epic’s arguments that Apple was violating antitrust law, or that they harmed Epic’s ability to distribute Fortnite through the App Store
  - “Walled gardens have existed for decades,” said the judge. “Nintendo has had a walled garden. Sony has had a walled garden. Microsoft has had a walled garden. What Apple’s doing is not much different… It’s hard to ignore the economics of the industry, which is what you’re asking me to do.”
  - “The 30% of what you complain seems to be the industry rate, right? Steam charges 30%. Microsoft: 30% … If you go to consoles: PlayStation, Xbox Nintendo all charged 30%. Physical stores: GameStop, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart all charge 30%. Apple and Google charged 30%. It’s all 30%, and you just want to gloss over it. You don’t want to address it,”
  - Epic’s Bornstein says alternatives to the smartphone have their own constraints. “For example you can’t play an Xbox when you are, you know, on a bus.”
  - YGR: “You can’t play, but you can play on a Switch.”
We’re still waiting for a decision on whether Fortnite will be allowed back on the App Store temporarily, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers did recommend that the case be taken to a jury trial in July to settle the issues permanently

iOS security recommendations

Settings > Passwords > Security Recommendations
Breaks down all your saved passwords that may need to be changed based on priority, and includes info on whether they’re easily guessed, reused, or if they’ve been included in a previous data breach
It also gives you a link right to the affected site if you want to go ahead and change the password
Thanks to that I’ve tightened up my password security on a lot of different sites
One thing to note here is that the current conspiracy theory going around on Facebook, saying that iOS 14 widgets are acting as key loggers and stealing passwords, is completely false
- Apparently part of the fuel for this is that people are getting notifications after upgrading that their passwords were involved in a breach- this is just because the notifications are new. The breaches are old.

Google announced a bunch of new stuff this week at their hardware event, including a new streaming service client

Not a streaming service itself, but Google TV is a client for Chromecast that shows content from services like Netflix and Disney+, alongside Google Play and YouTube videos
They also announced
- a new standalone Chromecast model that comes with a remote control for $50USD, so you can use Google TV without streaming content from your phone
  - Unfortunately Stadia was left out in the cold here- you can get it going with a bit of fiddling, but there’s no native support
- a 5G enabled Pixel 5 with somewhat underwhelming specs but a 90hz screen and IPX8 waterproofing that will set you back $700USD
- another 5G phone, the Pixel 4A 5G, that’s basically an upgraded Pixel 4A XL and working as a budget version of the Pixel 5 without the fancy display and waterproofing and a $500USD pricetag
- and a new Nest Audio speaker that we don’t have a lot of details on yet, but looks like a Google Home and a Google Home Max had a child and is apparently 75% louder than the Google Home it’s replacing

The new Spider-Man: Miles Morales game for the PS5 exists in a weird spot for a sequel, working almost like reverse DLC

You can get the game on the PS5, and if you want to play the remastered version of the PS4 Spider-Man you can either get the Miles Morales Ultimate Edition or buy the remaster from within the Miles Morales game
It’s apparently a full next-gen remaster with overhauled environments, ray-traced reflections and shadows, new skies and weather, a brand new face model for Peter Parker, 3D audio, instant loading, and a more powerful photo mode
Unfortunately all of this comes at a price- the trophy list will be separate from the original PS4 release, so trophy hunters are stuck starting from scratch

This Day in Gaming History

September 26 – 1995 – Command & Conquer – DOS

Command & Conquer develops ideas from Westwood’s previous game Dune 2, forming a real-time strategy (RTS) game.
- The control system involves selecting units with the mouse and then directing them, while the opponents make their moves without waiting for a “turn” to end.
The game focuses on a war between two organizations, The Brotherhood of Nod and the Global Defense Initiative.
- The player can take control of either side for more than 15 missions. Both have different units and structures, including artillery, tanks and light infantry.
In most missions, a base needs to be built first in order to build new units and structures.
- Most important are the harvesters, which collect Tiberium and deliver it to a refinery, where it’s converted into money, thus funding the construction of a base and an army.
The game also features FMV mission briefings and victory cutscenes.

September 27 – 2004 – Dream Works’ Shark Tale – GameCube, PS2, Xbox

Shark Tale is inspired by the movie of the same name and follows the adventures of Oscar, a blue-streaked cleaner wrasse fish.
- Oscar seems to have got himself into a bit of trouble as he needs to earn money to pay off a loan shark.
The game consists of over 25 chapters with each chapter having three missions to perform.
- The three missions are broken into a regular one, a bonus one, and an elite one.
- Completing missions earn Oscar fame points which affect his fame rating.
- Also, depending on how well Oscar performs missions will determine how much money he earns to pay off his debt.
- Missions are varied including things like escaping a shark, erasing graffiti, and a dancing segment.

September 28 – 1995 – Mario Clash – Virtual Boy – Japan

This game is essentially a single-player sequel to Mario Bros.
- While the Super Mario Advance games would later contain a graphically-enhanced version of Mario Bros., Mario Clash contains many more additions and changes to gameplay.
As before, the goal is to clear a screen of enemies and move on to the next level.
- However, rather than doing this by flipping an enemy upside-down from underneath and kicking them away, you throw shells at them.
- Also, taking advantage of Virtual Boy’s added depth, there is a front area and a back area which can be traveled to and from using pipes.
- Shells can also be thrown at enemies on the other depth area.

September 29 – 1996 – Super Mario 64 – N64 – North America

Mario is invited to Peach’s castle, but when he arrives Peach is nowhere to be seen.
- He soon learns from Toad that Bowser has once again kidnapped her.
- The Koopa King has also put a spell on her castle, imprisoning her subjects.
- So it is up to Mario to break the spell and rescue Peach.
Super Mario 64 is the first Mario game done entirely with 3D graphics.
- The core gameplay is similar to previous platform installments, focusing on jumping, avoiding obstacles and defeating enemies.
- Levels can be explored without time limits.
- Stars must be collected in order to unlock new areas, eventually gaining access to various parts of Bowser’s castle.
- Defeating Bowser on each floor procures keys necessary to unlock big doors and enter other floors, which contain more areas.
Mario has more moves at his disposal in this installment.
- Besides running and jumping, he can now walk, crouch, crawl, climb, and punch enemies.
- Double and triple jumps, long jumps, wall jumps and backflips can be executed as well.
- Swimming underwater now depletes Mario’s oxygen level.
- Items must be picked up and carried in some instances in order to solve puzzles.
Power-ups include the Wing Cap, which allows Mario to fly; the Metal Cap, which protects him from damage (including environmental hazards such as poisonous gas); and the Vanish Cap, which makes Mario ethereal, allowing him to walk through certain obstacles (such as wire mesh). Mario can also enter cannons and be shot from them; combining this with the flying ability grants access to high areas.

September 30 – 1997 – Postal – Windows/Mac

You’ve just gone off the deep end, and in your deeply demented mind, you’ve decided that this little peaceful town no longer needs peace and quiet.
- You gather your arsenal as you plan your next move…
Postal is best described as a three-quarter view isometric shooter with a disturbing theme.
- Instead of shooting at demons, monsters, bad guys and terrorists, your targets are typical citizens like a high school marching band, ordinary pedestrians, and even Santa Claus!
- You are provided with an arsenal of diverse weapons to choose from, ranging from good old fashioned guns to flame throwers.

October 1 – 2015 – The Beginner’s Guide – Windows, Mac, Linux

Probably a first, The Beginner’s Guide is presented as a guided tour through the work of another developer, named Coda.
- This developer is real and created numerous experimental small games using the Source engine from 2008 to 2011, the year in which he stopped developing games altogether.
The player is guided through this list of small games by the voice of Davey Wreden, the actual director of the game and co-designer and co-writer of The Stanley Parable.
- Similar to that game, The Beginner’s Guide can be considered a game about game design and about how players interact with games and, in a way, communicate with game developers.

October 2 – 1997 – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – PlayStation – North America

Symphony of the Night is a direct sequel to Rondo of Blood.
- Unlike the previous installments of the series, the game is set in a castle which the player can explore freely with many different paths, although often items in certain areas need to be found that will allow passage to others.
- The action-based gameplay incorporates now strong RPG elements.
- The hero receives experience points for defeating enemies, gains levels and becomes more powerful.
- There is also money to be found in the game, and various accessories to buy. In a separate screen, players need to equip attack weapons, shields and other items.
- Magic plays an important role, as well as secondary weapons and a large amount of “special moves” that are executed similar to advanced one-on-one fighting games.

Tidbits

After 11 years in operation, FarmVille is officially shutting down at the end of the year
- The developer cited the end of support for Adobe Flash and an unwillingness to migrate to a new platform as the main causes
Los Angeles Comic-Con is moving forward with an in-person event in December, making it one of the first Southern California festivals to do so since the March shutdown
- Precautions they’ll be taking include doubling their floorspace, spreading out activities across their own halls, splitting each day into five-hour sessions with deep cleaning between, cutting ticket sales, and live-streaming all guests and main panels for an optional virtual experience
- It sounds like they’re trying, but I’d still be really hesitant to buy tickets
Apple and Microsoft are working together a bit more than usual now, with the Apple TV app soon becoming available on the Xbox
- Content will include Apple TV+ subscriptions, which could save some money for people that have been eyeing up an Apple TV 4k box
- This could also be a good sign for Game Pass, if the two companies can improve their collaboration and get eachother’s streaming services on their hardware
As part of Amazon’s announcements last week that flew under the radar, they also introduced a drone camera for inside your home
- The Always Home Cam will set you back $250 and is a fully autonomous drone that can fly around and show your any room in your house
CD Projekt Red is drawing fire this week after doubling back on their commitment to avoiding mandatory crunch time for Cyberpunk 2077
- Studio Head Adam Badowski released a statement lamenting this decision and how necessary it is, and promising 10% of the company’s 2020 profit to the team, but this will likely make people think twice before taking him at his word again
Star Wars Squadrons has launched to a lot of praise, especially for its multiplayer, including the fact that a day-one patch has implemented full support for flight stick, throttle, and pedal assemblies. Combined with VR, the immersion sounds awesome

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PS2J 316 News – Super Money Printing Bros

September 4, 2020
Tagged as: 13.7, 19:17, 20, 30%, 360, 3D land, 7:17 pm, action, action adventure, Activision, agent, aimbot, Alan, alex winter, algorithm, Alien, all stars, alphabet, app store, Apple, Arcade, arkham, arma 2, Art, Artificial Intelligence, autonauts, battle royale, battlegrounds, bill and ted, blackmilk, brainiac, brawler, Call Of Duty, captain boomerang, cheat, China, colonize, colours, combat, come together, contact tracing, content bundles, court, crash bandicoot, crusader kings 3, cryptic studios, de blob 2, deadshot, Destiny 2, effie, epic, Epic Games, export, exposure notification, face the music, Facebook, fee, fight, First Person, for you, forced, forcefields, forsaken, Fortnite, Free Games, FTL, Gamepass, games with gold, gddr6x, goofball, Government, hack, Harley Quinn, home, Home Tour, impulsion, into the breach, iOS, ipad, iPhone, island, Isometric, John Wick, joint ops, Josh, keanu reeves, keys, kill the justice league, king shark, lady astronaut of mars, Lawsuit, Logan, lootboxes, magic, Mario Kart, mary robinette kowal, mech, mech city brawl, metropolis, Microsoft, mis-advertising, MMO, mod, modules, mp46, multicultural, Multiplayer, music, navy, neverwinter, nintendo, nintendo switch online, nvidia, Online, open-world, oracle, outcast, overreach, Override, people, physics, platform, playerunknown, Playstation, preston, ps+, PS4, PUBG, pubg mobile, puma, pumped bmx pro, puzzle, random, Ratchet and Clank, Reality, Red Dead Redemption, relentless moon, resident evil 7, retcon, Rocket League, rocksteady, RPG, RTX, sale, seal, second contact, shadowkeep, ships, Shooter, softbank, Sony, Space, speed, star trek online, stealth update, sticks, stones, story, street fighter v, stunt, Suicide Squad, Super Mario, Super Mario 3D All Stars, Super Mario Bros 35, Super Mario Galaxy, tears, tech company, the calculating stars, the division, the fated sky, The Gathering, the matrix, third person, tiktok, tiny troopers, tom clancy, tournament, trick, Turn Based, twin stick, Twitch, united states, universe, Unreal Engine, Update, us, voltron, wallhack, walmart, warzone, wayback machine, Xbox Live, xbox live gold, Xbox One

Free Games

Xbox One
- Override: Mech City Brawl
  - 2018
  - Gigantic robot mech brawler with single player and Voltron-style 2-4 player co-op, where every mech has special moves and skills, and you can fight in arenas around the world
- Tom Clancy’s The Division
  - 2016
  - Online-only action RPG / third person shooter where you play a special agent tasked with helping rebuild Manhattan and combat criminal activity after a viral outbreak. It has a combination of shared and instanced areas that have co-op and pvp multiplayer, in addition to missions and a story that you can run on your own
- de Blob 2
  - 2014
  - Platform puzzle game originally for the Xbox 360 that has you jumping around, mixing colours and bringing life to the cityscape. There’s also a basic two-player mode similar to Super Mario Galaxy
- Gamepass
  - We don’t normally mention new games on Gamepass, but this month some new highlights include Resident Evil 7, Crusader Kings 3, and Destiny 2 with the Shadowkeep and Forsaken expansions
  - Unfortunately Red Dead Redemption 2 is leaving on September 7th
PS4
- Street Fighter V
  - 2016
  - Fighting game similar to the other 2D style Street Fighter titles, it initially released without a story mode and only had a basic roster meant for tournament style gameplay until updates in 2018 and 2020 added in single-player modes and additional fighters
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
  - 2017
  - One of the original battle royale titles, it started life as a mod for ARMA 2 but evolved into a standalone title where you and 99 other players are dropped on to an island with the clothes on your back, and need to gather resources and take down the other players on a shrinking map
Epic Games
- Into the Breach
  - 2018
  - Control powerful mechs from the future to defeat an alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this isometric turn-based strategy game from the makers of FTL.
Twitch
- Pumped BMX Pro
  - 2019
  - Promoted as a BMX trickathon, it has you mastering 60 different levels and over 200 challenges while pulling off as many stunts as possible
- Effie
  - 2020
  - 3D action adventure game that combines combat, platforming, and puzzles with the exploration of a large, expanded world where you live a unique fantasy adventure in the style of Crash Bandicoot or Ratchet and Clank
- Impulsion
  - 2018
  - First person platformer designed to play with your nerves and reflexes, that has you making your way through 25 levels by manipulating physics and shooting forcefields to speed up or slow down
- Outcast – Second Contact
  - 2017 remake of the 1999 adventure game of the year and cult classic, Outcast
  - Third or first person open world shooter where you play an ex Navy SEAL stranded on an alien world trying to get home
- Tiny Troopers: Joint Ops
  - 2014
  - Arcade-style twin stick shooter that has your tiny troopers battling evil adversaries from around the world with a multitude of weapons and specialties
- Autonauts
  - 2019
    - Travel the universe and colonize uninhabited planets, starting with sticks and stones and going all the way up to art, space travel, and intergalactic export

Updates

Apple has officially terminated Epic Games’ account on its App Store, a move that won’t affect Unreal Engine but it does mean that users can no longer download Fortnite or other Epic titles for their iDevices
- Anyone that’s already downloaded the app can still play, but can no longer make ingame purchases
- This comes down as, despite the court’s recommendation that Epic comply with App Store guidelines while the case moves forward, they’ve instead repeatedly submitted Fortnite updates with the direct payment option in question intact
While Epic continues to cry foul to its users about updates now being blocked, Apple has been promoting another big battle royale title PUBG Mobile for iOS users, which is great timing as the game is also free this month on PS+
It seems like Facebook is trying to get their foot in the door when it comes to the Epic vs Apple payment fees conversation
- Facebook has a new feature that lets users buy tickets for online events. Unfortunately since online events count as digital content, they’re subject to the standard 30% fee
- Facebook tried to include wording on these purchases to say “Apple takes 30% of this purchase”, but according to Apple that’s irrelevant information and they blocked the update that would have added that wording
  - It probably falls under the usual terms and conditions that prevent developers from talking about other payment options from within iOS apps
- Google devices were reportedly supposed to get a message saying “Facebook doesn’t take a fee from this purchase”, which makes the warning on iPhones seem really targeted, but that message doesn’t show up on the Android version either
- Between showing the planned screens then publicizing the difference, it seems like Facebook is playing the same blame game as Epic in trying to get attention by breaking the rules and crying foul when they’re enforced

Cryptic Studios is under fire this week for “mis-advertising” content packs for Star Trek Online, something that Reddit users are saying is a common trend for the publisher

Apparently on multiple occasions they’ve announced content bundles that include ships, modules, and keys for lootchests, but then when the actual pack is released people purchase it to find things like the keys completely missing
The worst part of that is all of the blogs and advertising material have been stealth-updated to remove any mention of the missing rewards, leaving only services like the Internet Wayback Machine with proof of the change
- Once they were called out loudly enough they honoured the missing content for people that had purchased prior to the revision, but anyone working off of old information is left out in the cold
According to some users, they’ve historically done the very same thing in free to play titles like Neverwinter, and each time they just apologized and moved on
This is apparently the same studio working on the Magic: The Gathering MMO slated for a 2021 release, but with this kind of track record it’s hard not to be worried

The US government is getting even more involved with the forced sale of TikTok, now forcing some companies to back down in their offers

Apparently Walmart was set to make an offer to be the majority owner, teamed with with Alphabet and Softbank to invest in minority stakes, but the United States government apparently said they wanted a tech company to buy it instead
- Why they get a say is beyond me, but I guess they could move forward with the ban anyway if people don’t listen?
From the sounds of it Walmart is interested in getting into TikTok’s e-commerce and payments business, so since they were blocked they instead are teaming up as a minority shareholder with Microsoft taking the lead
- Alphabet couldn’t take the lead of Walmart’s original plans because of a potential antitrust investigation due to its ownership of YouTube
It looks like now the two options for TikTok are Microsoft/Walmart or Oracle, but though a deal was set to be made already China has now made a change to its export controls list to cover TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which means that thanks to TikTok’s “For You” page the Chinese government will now get a say in whether the sale goes through

Apple’s release the new iOS 13.7, and once you’ve got that installed you’ll be able to easily see if your area supports COVID-19 exposure notifications

The update has new options under Settings > Exposure Notifications (just below Emergency SOS), which include showing you if your area has an official contact tracing app and, if not, gives you a switch to be alerted once one is available
Just a reminder that these apps are secure, battery-friendly, and become a lot more effective in keeping people safe if everyone’s using them

Mario 35th Anniversary Direct

Game and Watch: Super Mario Bros.

A throwback to the old Game and Watch handhelds that Nintendo used to make
- This version has a bright colour screen
- You can play the entirety of Super Mario Bros
- There are also mini games that put Mario in the place of Mr. Game And Watch
- The clock function is very animated, more than just a static clock to watch
- Limited Production, Available November 13th

Super Mario World + Bowser’s Fury

Super Mario 3D World and all the fun and frustration it included is coming to Switch
As well as new content titled Bowser’s Fury
- Only shown in a brief teaser with a dark giant spiky cat bell powerup, on a rainy beach in a storm with purple lightning
Slated to release February 12th, 2021

Super Mario Bros. 35

In the vein of Tetris 99, this is Super Mario Battle Royal!
- Exclusive and free for Switch Online Members
You play original Super Mario Bros in the center of the screen
- In the UI around you, are 34 other people, racing to play Mario Bros faster than you
To attack other players, you defeat enemies as normal, and it sends them off to another player’s queue
- In your queue, you see that as you progress in the level, desaturated enemies are waiting to spawn in your path
- Everyone is racing against the clock, which you get more time by defeating enemies
- And like Tetris 99, you can target opponents by Lowest time, Most Coins, people attacking you and random
- And it seems like coins, not sure if they are acquired the same as in game, or some sort of bonus
  - And it appears you can buy a power-up for 20 of these coins.
Available October 1st
- Will be playable until March 31st, 2021

Mario Kart Live: Home Tour

OMG Mario Kart in real life!
This is an augmented reality game
- You purchase a Mario Kart RC Kart
  - Mario and Luigi seem available first
  - Looks like a traditional Kart, but if it had a large scoop for the engine, behind the racer, that has a camera
- These karts must come with a kit to make 4 arches
  - You start by driving your kart through the arches, painting the track behind you
  - When you connect to the track, it paints the width of the arches to make a race track
The commercial shows 2 kids playing on the same track
- On the Switch, an augmented reality race shows other digital characters racing with the 2 RC karts
October 16th, 2020

Nintendo Rewards for limited pins!

Everyone with a My Nintendo Account can complete Super Mario related missions
You may recieve cool rewards
- Including a Pin set of 10 Mario’s from games ranging from 1985 to 2020
- Will release in 2 waves, US and Canada Only
- September 3rd to March 31st 2021

Mario Kart Tour Event!

Special appearances of Mario and Donkey Kong Junior from the original Super Mario Kart for SNES
- September 8th, 2020, 11PM PST

Limited merchandise

Historical Super Mario items and special 35th Anniversary items
- Only at the Nintendo New York store
- And store.nintendo.com
- Starting in October

Mario Maker 2 Course

A special 35th Anniversary Ninji’s Speed Run course
- November 2020

Super Smash Bros Online Tournament

Limited to Super Mario franchise characters
- Stages and Items
Later this year

Splatoon Splat Fest

Which Power-up would you prefer?
- Super Size from a Mushroom
- Invincibility from a Super Star
- A My Nintendo reward item of a Mushroom and Super Star that got inked
  - To release closer to the SplatFest
  - Physical SplatFest shirts available online, now
January 2021

Animal Crossing

Super Mario themed furniture
- March 2021

And Licensed Super Mario products!

Puma Sneakers
- September 4th
BlackMilk Clothing
- October 5th
Mario Monopoly and Jenga
- Now
Mario Doll
- Now
Lego
- Lego Mario course
- Lego NES with Retro TV

Super Mario All Stars

Coming to the Super NES collection on Switch
- Updated to fit Widescreen tvs!

Super Mario 3D All Stars

Super Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy in one game
- Also has a music player, like Smash Ultimate
Limited physical release
- September 18th

This Day in Gaming History

August 29 – 2013 – Game Dev Tycoon – Windows

”Game Dev Tycoon” is a business simulator game where you control a game company.
- The game starts in the garage as many single video games developer did in the 80s.
- As you release successful games, more genres, employees and options are unlocked.
- As time progresses consoles and home computers are unlocked, but often using silly fictional names like PlaySystem and grPhone.
- The game is inspired by Game Dev Story in both name and gameplay.
This is a game I really enjoy and like to go back to from time to time
- Some of the achievements are for naming your Studio or Games based on real companies or releases.
- And some powerful characters you can hire are references to big game developers

August 30 – 2002 – Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure On Soccer Island – Game Boy Advance – United Kingdom Only

It’s football with a unique twist.
- David Beckham is called on to save Soccer Island from the evil Mister Woe, who has taken over the island by turning all of the animals into monsters.
- Not only that, he’s stealing all of the important items for himself.
Using David Beckham’s football skills, you must guide your hero through each level, kicking enemies and doors down with your football to the end of each level.
- Knock down the locks during the game to unlock the exit door and kick your ball through to complete it.
- Boss characters then require special attacks with your football to defeat them.

August 31 – 1997 – Final Fantasy 7 – Playstation

The seventh installment of the Final Fantasy series takes place in a post-modern, steampunk, sci-fi world where high technology reigns and where robots and bio-engineered mutants co-exist with humans and dragons.
To my surprise, the site I source for a lot of these games, Moby Games, had Final Fantasy 7’s North American release as the only game for August 31st, 1997

September 1 – 1984 – Klondike Solitare – DOS

A mouse-only game for DOS, Klondike Solitaire is a simulation of its namesake.
- Using the mouse to click cards, you move cards of alternate suits onto each other in an effort to move them off the tableau.
- Cheating is technically allowed, but doing so will get you “yelled at” by the program.
Felt this would be appropriate, as basically anyone to be stuck on a computer without an internet connection, has played solitaire
- And this may the first Klondike Solitare

September 2 – 2014 – The Sims 4 – Origin Windows

The Sims 4 is the fourth main game in the real-time life simulation / management series. Just like the previous games one or more custom characters are created through Create-a-Sim to live in a house designed by the player.
- As their lives unfold based on the environment, relationships and specific traits, the player gets to manage the life, needs to organize activities, attend to needs, and react to moods, with non-linear gameplay and no direct control.
I’ve been way into it again, as I bought Get Famous on a sale, before the latest expansion Eco Lifestyle came out.
- I reviewed that I really like the social media, and fame meter. As well as the Acting career
- And Eco Lifestyle added Ladders, as well as ways to produce your own water and power.
  - Which you can sell back to the grid for a profit.
If the fanily found it interesting, I was considering making Alan and I, and doing a Twitch stream.

September 3 – 1998 – Hong Pong – DOS

Hong Pong is a Pong variant set in five different war zones (including one hidden) and with tanks instead of paddles.
- Played with two tanks, one on each side of the screen, players need to prevent a spinning nuke from touching their side of the screen, while shooting missiles at the opponent or forcing the nuke to hit his side.
- In the middle of the screen different kinds of vehicles pass and these hurt the player when touched. It is also possible to activate a shield to block the incoming missiles, but while it is up firing is disabled.

September 4 – 1998 – Dune 2000 – Windows

Dune 2000 is a remake of the classic Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, updated for Windows.
- In this real-time strategy game, you can play one of the three houses: the noble Atreides, the insidious Ordos, or the evil Harkonnen.
- Each has different sets of units and tactics while maintaining an overall balance.
- The Atreides have air superiority and rely on their honor and alliance with planet natives, the Fremen.
- The Ordos rely on guerrilla tactics and superior technology, as well as mercenaries.
- The Harkonnen just go brutal, with no care for lives of their own troops or destruction, as long as they are victorious.
This game made me fall in love with the Dune franchise
- If you are interested in playing it again, I recommend OpenRA
- OpenRA is a project that recreates and modernizes the classic Command & Conquer real time strategy games.
- Relive the original Command and Conquer, C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000
- https://www.openra.net

Tidbits

Shout out to Bullfrog, thanks for saying you’ll give us a shot after our ad on Remember the Game.
- We really like Adams podcast, and we are blown away by his glowing review of us!
- Thanks to all our fanily, and welcome to anyone joining us from Remember the Game!

Good news for Rocket League players, once the game hits their free to play launch (we covered all the details in episode 310) you’ll no longer need PS+ or Nintendo Switch Online to play multiplayer
- Unfortunately it looks like Xbox Live Gold is still needed if you want to play on Xbox One
If you’re about to buy a new graphics card you’ll want to press pause until you check out nVidia’s new RTX 30 series
- The new hardware includes all sorts of fanciness like a brand new faster kind of memory (GDDR6X), low latency and high framerates even at 4k and 8k resolutions, and all kinds of ray-tracing beauty
- According to the specs released so far, even the entry level model 3070 beats the two year old 2080ti at less than half its current price
Rocksteady’s upcoming Suicide Squad game, subtitled Kill The Justice League, looks like it could be pretty good
- Featuring Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark in a Metropolis being menaced by Brainiac and a presumably mind-controlled Justice League, set in the Arkham game universe
Call of Duty Warzone players will be happy to hear that Activision is suing one of the top websites where players can purchase cheats and hacks for the game, like aimbots and wallhacks (xray vision)
- The lawsuit has forced the site in question to remove all Call of Duty content, leaving people that have previously paid for the cheats with nothing to show for it
  - Some are hoping for refunds, but the fact that people actively cheating at games are now out actual money is kind of delicious

Mini-reviews

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
- Perspective change threw me at first, but I was glad I recently re-read the other books because this takes place at the same time as The Fated Sky
- Another great addition to the Lady Astronaut of Mars series, and as well written as it was well studied
Bill and Ted Face the Music
- It felt like a lot of what we need right now in the world- a story about people coming together and celebrating eachother, with great acting from a lot of fantastic people, and a subtle reminder about how multicultural music has always been with so many roots in black culture, along with an ending that had me in tears
- After serious movies from The Matrix to John Wick, it’s always good to see what a goofball Keanu Reeves can be

For more content, Patreon supports get access to upcoming ideas and more!

Thank you Zane, a powerful man and a super hero dad. He’s one of the best #BeLikeZane

And thanks to the rest of our ‘fanily’ that support us.

And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

We are a proud member of the Alberta Podcast Network. Locally grown. Community supported.

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PS2J 315 News – No Oddjob, Slappers Only

August 28, 2020
Tagged as: 50%, action, Activision, ad agency, advertising, agent 47, Alan, america, Apple, arkham, assassination, audience network, backhanded, ban, base game, batgirl, Batman, battle royale, black ops, books, branching, Bungie, Burger King, bytedance, Call Of Duty, China, Cold War, consent, content, court, court of owls, cyberpunk, DC, Destiny 2, direct payment, donation, dragonfall, Epic Games, event, executive order, Facebook, Fall Guys, Fortnite, Free Games, goldeneye, gollum, gotham knights, Hitman, hong kong, ios 14, Josh, kraken, Lawsuit, leviathan, Link, lizardpeople, lord of the rings, mediatonic, MMO, monopoly, Monster, N64, narrative, Netflix, nightwing, nintendo, ogilvy, open-world, Origins, PC, personalities, pirate, plunder, Prince of Persia, Privacy, ps plus, PS4, ps5, quest, red hood, returns, robin, rocksteady, RPG, science fantasy, season, series x, shadowrun, shadowrun collection, ship, sméagol, sponsorship, stealth, story, stream, subscription, Suicide Squad, tabletop, tacky, takeshi’s castle, tempest, tencent, terms of service, text to speech, third person, tiananmen square, tiktok, tim sweeney, tolkien, Trump, Twitch, ultimate knockout, united states, Unreal Engine, Update, vault, warner bros, wipeout, Xbox One, Zelda, zuckerberg

Free games

Twitch
- Tempest
  - 2016
  - Pirate-themed open world action RPG with hundreds of quests and countless ships to plunder. Customize your ship, trade, challenge fellow pirates and face terrible mythical monsters such as Kraken and Leviathan.
Epic Games
- Hitman
  - 2016
  - Third person stealth assassination game in episodic form, taking Agent 47 all around the world to prove he is the ultimate silent assassin
- Shadowrun Collection
  - Shadowrun Returns
    - 2013
    - Science fantasy cyberpunk turn based tactical RPG based on the tabletop RPG of the same name, with extra custom campaigns available from Steam or third-party websites
  - Shadowrun Dragonfall
    - Originally an expansion pack for Shadowrun Returns, it was released as its own game in 2015 with new missions and other content improvements
  - Shadowrun Hong Kong
    - Another expansion pack for Shadowrun, built on an improved engine and released for free for everyone that owned the original

Updates

In new court documents shown in the case between Epic Games and Apple, it looks like Epic has been angling for a special deal with Apple for months now
- Emails from CEO Tim Sweeney show him asking for special considerations when it comes to the App Store’s 30%, and even going so far as to ask for the ability to make their own app store for iPhones completely separate from Apple’s
- Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is so far upholding Apple’s right to remove Fortnite from the App Store, leading Epic to incite their players by announcing how they’ll be missing out on new updates and events because of Apple, even though this entire crisis is all because of Epic Games and could be fixed by them just removing the direct payment option they’re trying to use to get around Apple’s payment system
  - And they are really working to incite their players. Their FAQ about the topic is full of rhetoric like accusing Apple of forcing Epic to collude to maintain their monopoly (read: making them follow the terms of their contract) and saying Apple “intentionally sabotages consumer iOS devices” to prevent them from installing apps directly from developers. Which is not sabotage so much as it is how iOS has been designed.
- Judge Rogers has said that Apple can’t take actions that would affect the Unreal Engine though, so at the moment Epic’s developer accounts are safe since that is somewhat separate from the Fortnite app
- A full hearing is set for September 28th, and the lawsuit is expected to run for months if not years

An ad agency decided to bypass proper sponsorships and go straight to Twitch stream text-to-speech donations to talk about Burger King

The agency Ogilvy tweeted a video showing the results of their campaign that had them donating the price of various Burger King menu items, never more than $5, and using the text-to-speech donation message to talk about the products
- The streamers’ faces were blurred, and presumably for legal reasons their gameplay footage was replaced by fake games
One streamer hit the nail on the head when pointing out a problem with that- they asked “listen, are you gonna sponsor me or not?”, to which Ogilvy replied in the video “We gave you $5!”
- Considering the advertising budgets that can go in to even something as small and simple as this, that’s complete bull
The video wraps up with streamers thanking the Twitch user for their donation, but mainly just because they’re being polite even though their platform was just taken advantage of
As stated by RubberNinja, it should probably be investigated by the FTC, because this was a blatant misuse of the stream footage and trying to sneak brand deals in for a pittance is just tacky and borderline illegal
- Some of the streamers recognized themselves in the video, and have said that they were not approached for consent
- And many have pointed out that not only does this seem to violate Twitch’s terms of service, it could also interfere with actual legitimate deals that streamers may have had with competing brands

DC and Warner Bros have announced a new Batman game coming in 2021, sans Batman

Gotham Knights will star Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing, and Red Hood, all taking on the Court of Owls and stepping up to take care of Gotham with Batman out of the picture
The title will hit the PS4, PS5, PC, XBone, and Series X, and is being made by the team behind Arkham: Origins
Rocksteady, the developers that made the original Arkham titles, have apparently been working on a Suicide Squad adaptation

Bungie is making interesting choices with Destiny 2, vaulting content that people have paid for as part of the Beyond Light expansion

About two years worth of content, including campaigns, areas and story, totalling $95, will simply no longer exist
They will be offering new content, but to take away stuff that you’ve paid for and treat a video game like it’s Netflix is a disturbing precedent
- When you’re playing an MMO you can expect some content will be event or season based, but in this case they’re taking away base Destiny 2 content, two DLC’s, three seasons of content, and two expansions. None of which was advertised as transient or limited-access
And on top of questions of ownership, it could also leave a pretty big gap for people looking for a narrative thread. It destroys any kind of cohesive experience in exchange for Fortnite-style seasons

Facebook is warning investors that Apple’s iOS 14 could shave more than half of its Audience Network revenue (and a chorus of angels sang out: “Good.”)

The Facebook Audience Network lets advertisers track mobile users with a unique device ID to target ads and measure their effectiveness, but where it’s currently a manual opt-out process if you wanted to keep a semblance of privacy, on iOS 14 users will now see a prompt when they first open an app that wants to track them
- And of course if given a popup that says “Hey, can we sell your information for advertising?”, most people will click no. And that makes Mark Zuckerberg sad. And it makes me very happy.

This Week In Gaming History

August 22 – 1987 – The Legend Of Zelda – NES

The start of one of the most prolific adventure series
The game was the first to have an open world where the player had to explore the world and learn the best route to complete the game.
The theme, composed by Koji Kondo, is synonyms with adventure to gamers everywhere.

August 23 – 2011 – Deus Ex: Human Revolution – PS3, Xbox 360, Windows

Set in the year 2027, Human Revolution focuses on ex-SWAT officer Adam Jensen, who is employed as a security officer for Sarif Industries, a company on the leading edge of advanced and controversial artificial organs dubbed “augmentations”.
- An attack on Sarif Industries that apparently kills researcher and Adam’s ex-girlfriend Megan Reed also leaves Adam critically injured. To save him, company CEO David Sarif subjects him to an extensive augmentation procedure: six months later, now recovered and possessing advanced augmentations, Adam sets out to pursue his attackers and the shadowy organization behind them.
- The story explores themes of transhumanism, the growing power of megacorporations, and their impact on social class.
- It also uses the series’ recurring cyberpunk setting and conspiracy theory motif.
Development of Human Revolution began in 2007 with a small team within the fledgling Eidos Montréal studio, after multiple aborted attempts to create a sequel at original developer Ion Storm following the 2003 release of Deus Ex: Invisible War.
- The two key influences were the myth of Icarus, a thematic element carried over from Deus Ex; and the artwork and ideas of the Renaissance, which influenced the story, graphics, and music, while combining with the series’ typical cyberpunk elements.
- The open-ended nature of the gameplay was tricky for the team to achieve; as a result, the boss battles were outsourced to another developer due to time constraints.
- The music, composed by Michael McCann, focused on ambiance and three-layered compositions over character themes and overt melodies.

August 24 – 2020 – No Straight Roads – Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Windows

Start a rock band & end the EDM empire in NO STRAIGHT ROADS, a rockin’ action-adventure from the minds of Wan Hazmer (Final Fantasy XV) and Daim Dziauddin (Street Fighter V).
Explore Vinyl City & fight musical megastars on your journey to defeat oppressive EDM empire ‘NSR’, in an action-packed adventure that mashes together rhythm-infused third-person combat with a kick-ass soundtrack!
Key Features:
- Discover the world of Vinyl City, meet larger-than-life characters and lead a musical revolution to end the EDM empire.
- Rock out solo in an action-packed single-player campaign or band up with a friend in couch co-op.
- Master rhythm-infused third-person combat as Mayday & Zuke, members of indie rock band Bunk Bed Junction, each with their own music-based weapons and attacks.
- Defeat musical megastars from a range of genres, including a pop-tastic boy band, a globe-spinning DJ, a child prodigy pianist and more on your journey to bring back rock.
- Fight for your right to rock! Learn awesome new moves, upgrade your abilities and use the power of music to transform props into weapons.
- Experience an awesome dynamic soundtrack from a line-up of musical talent, including Falk Au Yeong, Andy Tunstall, Funk Fiction, James Landino, Masahiro “Godspeed” Aoki, Az Samad, Clyde Rabatel and the Video Game Orchestra.
- Partner up with an additional local player to take control of the Elliegator, a secret alligator assistant who can help players in battle by picking up items, transforming props and calling in useful bonuses.
- Assist Mode lets up to three local players experience No Straight Roads’ music-based action together, only on Nintendo Switch™.
- Touchscreen Support – Use the Nintendo Switch™ system’s touch screen to transform props and pick up items.

August 25 – 1997 – GoldenEye 007 – N64

This game introduced the first person shooter genre to many people
It was thought that FPS would never work off of PC, and this was a huge step forward for console gaming.
I’ve seen the game many times, and never the movie.

August 26 – 1989 – Game & Watch Multi Screen: Zelda – Dedicated Handheld

Game & Watch Multi Screen: Zelda is the fifteenth and last game in the fourth (and biggest) series of Game & Watch games published by Nintendo, also known as the Multi Screen Series, consisting of 15 titles.
- Unreleased in Japan.
The G&W Zelda game mixes the exploration part of the first Zelda game with the combat gameplay of Zelda II.
- The goal of your quest is to save Princess Zelda by gathering pieces of the Triforce, each hidden in one of the eight dungeons of the Hyrule Kingdom.
- Each dungeon is crowded with monsters and ghosts.
- To go from one room to the next you’ll have to choose between two paths, but only after defeating an armed Goblin.
- When defeated you’ll get an randomized item: the dungeon map, extra hearts, an axe or magic potions.
- After defeating the dragon in the last room the piece of Triforce is awarded to Link.
The upper screen shows all the useful information: the items you own, the dungeon map, pieces of Triforce gathered and the boss location. The lower screen shows all the action that is happening.

August 27 – 2015 – Pixel Slime U – Wii U

PIXEL SLIME U is a unique auto-platformer that challenges you to get the LOWEST score possible.
Jump, twist, and glide your way through 40 challenging levels while trying to avoid death.
This game will keep you coming back while you compete with others on Miiverse™ to have the LOWEST score.m

August 28 – 2000 – Mario Tennis – N64

My favorite Mario sports spinoff
Choose your favourite Nintendo character and take to the world of tennis.
- Game types include ring shot (where you must shoot the ball through golden hoops that are suspended above the play area, gaining bonus points as you play), bomb tennis (simply put Tennis with Bombs) and Piranha Challenge (much like the tennis machines which chuck balls at you, but in this case they are replaced with Piranha plants).
- Of course, there is your normal tournament mode, with up to 4 players in on the action, and some crazy arenas, especially Bowser’s Castle, which is suspended above a lava pit!
I was hoping for something more like this game with Aces, but I was sorely disappointed with how Aces felt to me.

Tidbits

The debut trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has been blocked in China and subsequently edited everywhere else, because it used about a second’s worth of footage from the famous Tiananmen Square protest
- But I’m sure this has nothing to do with Chinese company Tencent’s stake in Call of Duty owner Activision
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is now officially the most downloaded PS Plus game of all time world-wide
- The game is a fair bit of fun, too, taking the Takeshi’s Castle and Wipeout formulas and turning them into quick little 60 person battle-royales
TikTok parent company ByteDance is suing the US government over Trump’s executive order demanding the sale of TikTok to an American company under threat of being banned from the US
- It seems kind of ironic that they’re suing a national government because of accusations of not being able to stand up to another national government, but it is what it is
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is apparently next-gen Prince of Persia-like stealth game coming in 2021
- The game will feature a branching narrative, which could get interesting considering we all know how the story ends for Gollum, but it aims to expand on hints given by J.R.R. Tolkien about Sméagol to make a story that fits along with the books and works in aspects of his warring personalities

For more content, Patreon supports get access to upcoming ideas and more!

Thank you Renée, and check out her podcast that Josh works on, Ravage Love.

And thanks to the rest of our ‘fanily’ that support us.

And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

We are a proud member of the Alberta Podcast Network. Locally grown. Community supported.

And talk to us in the comments!

PS2J 313 News – Stifling Innovation

August 14, 2020
Tagged as: 1984, 2021, action, Adventure, Alan, alto collection, alto’s adventure, alto’s odyssey, android, antitrust, app store, Apple, big brother, biometric, bytedance, California, China, commission, control, controller, covid-19, date, delay, DLC, duke nukem forever, Epic Games, excel, executive order, expansion, explore, Facebook, Fortnite, Free Games, from the ashes, genetics, Government, guideline, halo infinite, hand-made, homie, illegal, illinois, in-app, information, Instagram, interdimensional evil, Josh, Lawsuit, Microsoft, monopoly, mystery, next-gen, ninteen eighty-fortnite, No Mans Sky, offerup, payment, personal information, point and click, postapocalyptic, president, Privacy, propaganda, protest, PS4, ps5, redesign, remnant, rename, research, RPG, sandboard, Sci-Fi, season pass, security, series s, series x, Shooter, shopping, snowbaord, soulsborne, Steam, stop-motion, surface duo, tablet, temple, third person, tiktok, truberbrook, Trump, Twitch, ultimate, united states, usa, v-bucks, wechat, XBone, XBox, Xbox One, zakk_exe

Free games

Twitch
- Truberbrook
  - 2019
  - A point-and-click sci-fi mystery adventure game with hand-made scenery and stop-motion elements married with 3D animation
Epic Games
- Remnant: From the Ashes
  - 2019
  - Third person action RPG shooter that borrows mechanics from the Soulsborne games with the addition of more gunplay on top of melee combat, where the earth has been decimated and overrun by an interdimensional evil called the Root
- The Alto Collection
  - Alto’s Adventure
    - Join Alto and his friends as they embark on an endless snowboarding odyssey. Journey across the beautiful alpine hills of their native wilderness, through neighbouring villages, ancient woodlands, and long-abandoned ruins.
  - Alto’s Odyssey
    - Join Alto and his friends and set off on an endless sandboarding journey to discover its secrets. Soar above windswept dunes, traverse thrilling canyons, and explore long-hidden temples in a fantastical place far from home.

Trump has apparently issued executive orders that will ban not only TikTok but also WeChat from operating in the US if they aren’t sold by their Chinese-owned companies by the end of September

As we’ve reported Microsoft is already looking at buying TikTok from its parent company ByteDance, but this is the first we’re hearing about anything to do with WeChat
- WeChat started life as a popular chat platform, especially for communicating with people in China as other US messaging apps are banned by the Chinese government, but has grown with abilities like transferring money and shopping online
Trump’s order alleges that TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users,” such as location data and browsing and search histories, which “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
- There’s some basis to these worries, since a Wall Street Journal report found that the app tracked Android users’ MAC addresses for over a year, as recently as November 2019
  - A MAC address is a globally-unique identifier for any device that connects to a network, and is normally blocked so they had to build a workaround to even get the information
- The order also claims that the platform censors or disseminates content in keeping with the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda, citing “when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.”
And the one for WeChat is pretty similar, but also includes a ban on financial transactions with its owner Tencent
I can see where this is all coming from, but as TikTok said in a statement it sets a dangerous precedent in forcing foreign companies to sell to American ones if they want to operate in the US
And you have to wonder how much of this is fuelled by the stunt organized by many TikTok users which had them registering for thousands of tickets to the Trump campaign rally in Tulsa but not showing up, which likely contributed to the sparse attendance
- As we’ve seen before, when something hits Trump’s ego he’s likely to lash out in toddlerific fashion
It’s gotten to the point where TikTok is apparently planning to sue the Trump administration, challenging the executive order and arguing that the action is unconstitutional as it does not give the company a chance to respond
- They also state that the national security justification is baseless, according to a source talking to NPR, and that it’s built on pure speculation and conjecture

Epic Games has decided to take on Apple and their App Store in a calculated move regarding in-app purchases

Earlier this week, Epic introduced a new direct payment option in the Fortnite app for iPhone and iPad, allowing players to purchase in-game currency at a discount by bypassing Apple’s in-app payment framework and giving the money directly to Epic Games
The problem with that is Apple’s App Store guidelines are specifically against that, saying that not only do purchases of in-game currencies need to go through the App Store, but also that you’re not even allowed to tell someone about other purchasing options
- This makes sense to a point, because Apple generally gets 30% of App Store sales and if someone could say “Hey, pay on our website and it’s cheaper!” then that revenue would drop significantly
Epic Games knows exactly what they’re doing in flouting these regulations though, and in an FAQ they described not only Apple’s but also Google’s 30% commission as “exorbitant”, leading them to introduce an alternate payment system to offer 20% discounts
- If you’re doing the math at home, I guess they’re grabbing that extra 10% for themselves
So just hours after the new payment option was brought online, Apple pulled the Fortnite app from the App Store
- In a statement provided to MacRumors, Apple said that Epic Games knowingly violated the App Store guidelines, and just because they want to push for a special arrangement doesn’t change the fact that the same set of rules should apply to everyone
- One thing to note, this doesn’t stop anyone from playing the game if they’ve already downloaded it, it just stops new downloads
Shortly afterward, Epic announced a new Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite short riffing on Apple’s 1984 ad and likening Apple to Big Brother
- The fact that they had this ready in the chamber shows they knew exactly what they were doing when breaking those rules and how Apple would react
- And they’re definitely going guns-blazing, claiming at the end of the video that “Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices”, even though as we previously said anyone that already downloaded it can still play
Then Epic Games filed a pre-prepared lawsuit against Apple for pulling Fortnite, accusing Apple of being “the behemoth seeking to control markets, block competition, and stifle innovation”, imposing “anti-competitive restraints” and using “monopolistic practices in markets” against developers
- It’s a little hard to justify this though, since Apple basically built a walled garden and made it attractive enough for people to want to play in it. Just because you break the rules and get kicked out doesn’t mean they owe you a spot inside.
Epic says it’s not looking for a cash payout, but instead wants to secure relief in the iOS app distribution and payment processing market for consumers and developers
- Digging in to the lawsuit, it looks like they’re using this situation as a wedge to argue that iOS should be as open to third-party software as the Mac is. In fact, they’re almost saying it’s illegal not to be
At this point is feels like Epic Games is jumping on the antitrust bandwagon, protesting that Apple’s not making enough space for them to thrive, but I wonder how it would feel if this kind of thing was applied globally.
- Look at Fortnite- it has a huge audience and I have no way of making money off of it. If I draw a gun skin and want to sell it inside of Fortnite there’s no way for me to do so. Because Epic is stifling my innovation and imposing anti-competitive restraints by forcing people to use its own currency inside the game instead of giving players a chance to give me money for my work.

Microsoft’s rumoured Xbox Series S has been confirmed by leaked controller packaging, and the controller’s pretty nice too

The new Xbox controller has slight design tweaks all over the place, with a redesigned d-pad, textured triggers, a new share button, and a slightly smoothed out shape
- It reportedly even works on the current generation Xbox One, with onscreen graphics matching the updated controller
The packaging specifies that the controller works with the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles. The Series X has already been announced, but this is the first official word we’re hearing of the Series S
- The S is expected to run the same CPU as the Series X, but with less RAM and a slower GPU
Twitter user @zakk_exe managed to buy the controller from someone on the online classifieds app OfferUp who “got it from a homie”

Facebook is facing yet another lawsuit over how the company uses the personal information of its users, this time because of Instagram

Last month Facebook offered a $650M settlement for illegally collecting biometric data via its photo tagging feature
- If approved, affected users could be paid up to $400 each
Now a new case has been filed in California, accusing Facebook of collecting, storing, and profiting from the biometric data of over 100M Instagram users.
- The biggest problem is that there was no consent involved, and users weren’t even made away of the data harvesting.
- Instagram apparently let people know at the start of this year, but it’s believed to have occurred for some time before that
- The lawsuit states that the unauthorized collection of this info would be a violation of Illinois privacy law, in which case Facebook could be forced to pay up to $5000 per violation

This Week In Gaming History

August 8 – 2013 – Cookie Clicker – Browser

Cookie Clicker is an endless game where the entire point is to gather cookies, then use them to buy items and upgrades which do nothing but gather cookies even faster.
It is highly regarded as the first, at least, the most influential incremental clicker game.

August 9 – 2018 – Discord Nitro Beta Releases

On the Discord Blog, this was posted “Today, we’re slowly rolling out a beta test to about 50,000 of our Canadian players and will be expanding to more over time. These players will see an upgraded version of Discord Nitro that has access to a curated selection of games along with the current subscription perks. They’ll also see a new Discord Store tab in the home screen with individual games for purchase.”
Released on the Beta, the following games for Windows:
- Bridge Constructor
- Dandara
- Darksiders: Warmastered Collection
- Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition
- GoNNER
- Kathy Rain
- Kingdom: New Lands
- Metro: Last Night – Redux
- Slime-san: Superslime Edition
- Super Meat Boy
- System Shock: Enhanced Edition
- Tormentor X Punisher
- de Blob

August 10 – 2004 – Ben’s Game – Windows

A special 3d game designed by Ben Duskin and LucasArts. Ben is a 9 year old with Leukemia. Ben worked with the Make-A-Wish foundation to find a developer for Ben’s game. Ben wanted to make a game that would help kids battle cancer.
The game involves a changeable character riding a skateboard over an imaginary playing field, made of red blood cells and cartoon representations of viral infections. The character collects innoculents to shoot at his enemies. The player pivots his character in order to steer around objects and collect bonus shots.

August 11 – 1993 – Samurai Shodown – Neo Geo

In early feudal Japan, a man named Shiro Tokisada Amakusa preaches a heretic religion. Little does anyone know that Amakusa is really a servant of the evil Ambrosia, who had possessed and taken over Amakusa’s body, as Ambrosia wishes to shroud the world into eternal darkness. Now, the player must select from out of 12 fierce warriors and plus 3 bonus characters in order to fight for the honor of defeating Amakusa once and for all, while fulfilling a specific mission for each and every warrior in the game.
The Genesis version of the game does not however include the Earthquake which has been removed due to its 16-bit memory capacity and technical size limitations.

August 12 – 1981 – PC-DOS Included Game – DOS

Included with IBM’s PC-DOS was Microsoft’s BASICA (Advanced BASIC) interpreter and several programs, one of which was a game and hence is of interest to us: DONKEY.BAS.
Directing a sports car on a stretch of rural road, the player must beware of donkeys roaming its picturesque lanes. Spot a donkey ahead and the player must quickly determine whether to switch lanes with the space bar before the car’s course brings it into a messy head-on collision. With each burro successfully traversed, the car moves a little higher on the road — closer to earning a point for the player (after passing eleven mules) but also giving less response time between the appearance of the titular donkey and its potential impact.
The game credits two people for coding the game
- Neil Kozen, whose other credit is for designing Forza Motorsport
- Bill Gates

August 13 – 2013 – Papers, Please – Steam

Papers Please is a simulation game based on the life of a immigration inspector charged with checking passports at the border of a fictional communist state, Arztoska.
- The game is set after the conclusion of a six year war with neighboring Kolechia, the war has moved the combatants boarded and left the city of Greznin split.
- Kolechia controls the west and Arztoska the east. The game begins with the player being selected for border duty in Arztoska’s monthly labor lottery. He (the player character is unnamed) and his family are relocated to the city of Greznin.
A powerful game paralleling the Cold War in Europe.

August 14 – 1989 – Altered Beast – Sega Genesis, North America

You are a hero raised from the dead by the god Zeus to rescue his daughter Athena.
- With scenery inspired by Ancient Greece, you have to fight hordes of undead and demons, with a boss at the end of each level until you meet the god Neff, who holds the girl captive.
Made by Team Shinobi, creators of the first Shinobi game, as well as Golden Axe
Fun podcast fact, the bit crushed audio from this game “Rise From Your Grave” is used as a bumper on the Last Podcast On The Left.

Tidbits

Researchers are rejoicing over changes to the names of human genetics, all because of Excel
- Apparently there were genes with names like “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1”, which was abbreviated to MARCH1. The problem was that Excel would automatically format that as the date 1-Mar and confuse data with no way to turn the feature off
- There are manual options to prevent this, but they need to be applied to each spreadsheet and for many people that aren’t necessarily power users the data would just end up corrupted each time it was exported
Control is taking fire for how it’s unveiling the new Ultimate edition as part of the release of its second expansion
- The Ultimate Edition will come with all updates and content, including both expansions, and see a Steam release for the first time
- The problem is that only people who buy the Ultimate Edition will get an upgrade to the next-gen version when it comes out for the Series X and PS5
  - People who bought the game day one, or even those who purchased the season pass, will not get the free upgrade on next-gen consoles and would need to buy the game all over again
MIcrosoft’s new Surface Duo Android tablet finally answers the burning question “Hey, how much would it cost to slap a hinge on two 6” tablets?”.
- The answer is apparently $1400 USD
Halo Infinite has officially been delayed until 2021, citing COVID-related impacts and other development challenges and saying the extra time will help them deliver the most ambitious Halo game ever
- I’d quote Miyamoto about this, but as we’ve seen over the years with No Man’s Sky and Duke Nukem Forever development time doesn’t necessarily equate to quality

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PS2J 297 News – Soylent Strikes Back

April 17, 2020
Tagged as: 2, 3d touch, 4, a13 bionic, action, Adventure, Alan, Alberta, alberta medical association, American, among thieves, android, Animal Crossing, Apple, attack, avalanche, babylon health, bc, bluetooth, branching, breach, Canada, car, championship, chaos, chatbot, chime, consent, conservative, contact, controller, covid-19, credentials, cybersecurity, cyble, date, dialogue, don’t, drake’s deception, drake’s fortune, eco-terrorism, Epic Games, episode i, esports, european, facebook ads, FaceID, final fantasy vii, final fantasy xii, float, Free Games, fun, Gambling, gaming control, gender-bias, glide, Google, grappling hook, Green, haptic touch, health minister, heart, hiv/aids, Indie, indirect, iOS, iPhone, iphone 11, iPhone 8, iphone se, italy, jason kenney, jessie, Josh, Journey, Just Cause, kingdom hearts, knack, lara croft, League of Legends, liberate, Mac Pro, mako, may the 12th be with you, midgar, misdiagnose, mountain, Multiplayer, narrative, nathan drake, nathan drake collection, nevada, nintendo, ontario, opt-in, Overwatch League, panic, password, platforming, play at home, Playstation, plus, Polygon, positive, ppe, premiere, Privacy, product(red), PS4, public health, puzzle, quebec, racer, re-use, remake, remap, road trip, rockets, sandbox, sd card, shinra, shooting, silent, slay the spire, slippery slope, Sony, Soylent, Square Enix, Star Wars, stuffing attackes, Switch, symptom checker, Telus, test, third person, thirsty, tinder, tires, Tomb Raider, touchid, tracing, track, tyler shandro, Uncharted, upc, vast desert, visual novel, webmd, wheels, wheels of aurelia, wingsuit, xr, xs, zoom

Free Games

Epic
- Just Cause 4
  - 2018
  - Third-person action-adventure sandbox that throws you into the world with a wingsuit, grappling hook, hot air balloons, rocket boosters, and all kinds of weaponry, then asks you to liberate the land from its oppressive government
- Wheels of Aurelia
  - 2016
  - A visual novel / adventure game that takes you on a road trip through the gritty western coast of Italy during the 1970’s. Playing as Lella, a bold, spunky woman, experience the sights and sounds of a tumultuous time in Italy’s history while uncovering events from Lella’s past through branching dialogue and multiple endings.
PS4 (without Plus!) until May 5th as part of Sony’s Play At Home initiative
- Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection
  - 2015
  - Free for PSPlus members in January, remastered port of the first three Uncharted games from the PS3 era: Drake’s Fortune, Among Thieves, and Drake’s Deception
  - Uncharted is known for its Tomb Raider style third-person action adventure gameplay including shooting, combat, and puzzle solving
- German and Chinese gamers will get Knack 2 instead of Uncharted
  - 2017
  - Action platforming game that has you punching, kicking, and changing size to fight enemies, solve puzzles, and find upgrades. It also has local drop-in-drop-out multiplayer co-op
- Journey
  - 2015
  - A lovely indie adventure game that originally hit the PS3 in 2012, you control a robed figure in a vast desert, travelling toward a mountain in the distance. Along the way you may encounter another player and assist each other for a while, but there’s no chat or communication other than a musical chime you use to activate strange pieces of cloth and affect the world. You don’t even see each other’s names until after the credits

Thanks to an indirect data breach, there are over 500K Zoom accounts being sold on the dark web and in hacker forums

Cybersecurity firm Cyble was able to purchase 530K zoom credentials for about 1/5 of a cent each this month, verifying the legitimacy of the leak
With the credentials, hackers can access your account information like your name, email address, password, personal meeting URL, and your account’s HostKey
The twist here is that Zoom didn’t actually have a data breach themselves- I said ‘indirect’ because from the sounds of it these login details were the results of “credential stuffing attacks”, where hackers attempt to log in to a service using accounts previously leaked
- That means that if you’ve re-used a password that has been compromised, especially if you’re using the same email address, there’s a good chance that you may be affected.

Apple and Google announced a joint effort this week that will see them using Bluetooth to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 around the world

Starting in May, both Apple and Google will release functionality that will let Android and iOS devices help track potential exposure using apps from public health authorities (like the Canadian government COVID-19 app)
Then in the coming months they’ll work to enable broader Bluetooth-based tracing built directly into their platforms, allowing interaction with a wider variety of apps and government health authorities
- The initial idea for this piece is that everyone who opts in will get a random, rotating identifier that changes every 15 minutes
  - The list of identifiers you’ve been in contact with doesn’t leave your phone unless you explicitly share it
- This ID will get transmitted to other nearby devices via Bluetooth automatically
- The idea is that, locally on your device, you can see a 14 day window of whether your phone has been near the device of someone self-identifying that they’ve tested positive for COVID-19
  - The trick here being that users testing positive aren’t identified to Apple, Google, or other users. It’s all anonymized.
Of course, this is going to need some major security, as privacy and consent are going to be very important to this kind of endeavour
- Having both Apple and Google working on it will be good, as they can keep each other in check (thought I feel like Apple will have to be the main privacy watchdog here)
The tool isn’t meant to track locations, but rather personal contact, so it’s not as bad as it could be. But it’s going to have to be locked down airtight or a lot of information could potentially be reverse-engineered from this

Telus’s Babylon Health app is being promoted in Alberta via a deal with Premier Kenney and could be dangerous to women’s health

The Babylon app is meant to allow people to check symptoms and contact doctors remotely through text or video chats, which you’d think was a great idea in the current situation
It’s even currently covered by BC’s provincial health care, and Alberta’s premier Jason Kenny and our minister of health Tyler Shandro made a deal with Telus to distribute it in Alberta
Unfortunately they didn’t consult a single doctor before-hand to verify the app’s effectiveness
Doctors have found that the built in symptom checker is deeply flawed- with the exact same symptoms and history (60 years old, 20/day smoker, sudden chest pain and nausea), a male is diagnosed with a heart attack and told to visit emergency services, but a woman is told it’s a panic attack and that some symptoms may need to be checked out by a GP within 6 hours
This is another great example of not only health care’s gender-bias, which is appalling, but also our government’s messed up priorities
The president of the Alberta Medical Association has gone on record saying that the way the app and its physicians are put together, the fact that they don’t actually have access to your medical records, and how they don’t coordinate your care at all beyond faxing your family doctor if you specifically request it, leads to fragmented and potentially dangerous medical care
At this point we have our government effectively advertising a handicapped, pseudo-privatized health care
- But then again, we also live in the province that spent between $14-20K buying Facebook ads to promote Kenney donating PPE and ventilators to BC, Ontario, and Quebec

Apple announced their new iPhone SE this week, and though the name hasn’t changed everything else has

The new device is using the iPhone 8 body and comes in three colours- white, black, and Product(Red) that has proceeds going toward COVID-19 aid instead of HIV/AIDS this time around
Specs-wise it has a 4.7” LCD display, the same processor as the flagship iPhone 11, TouchID 2 and Haptic Touch, the same camera as the XR and XS, and dual/eSIM support
- So with this device replacing the iPhone 8, 3D Touch is officially dead and Haptic Touch (aka press and hold) unfortunately is the victor
That means you’ll see some fantastic performance for years to come as long as you don’t mind not having FaceID and using a slightly more basic screen
All that starts at $399 USD ($599 CAD) for the 64GB, up to $549 USD ($809 CAD) for the 256GB version

Final Fantasy VII Remake mini-review

Really good, a ton of fun for fans of both the old and new styles of Final Fantasy game
I really like the world they’ve built out of the first chunk of the original, and I’m looking forward to more

Soylent is back baby!

Soylent.ca is where to get it
Not following our Soylent coverage and you’re confused why we’re ecxited
Here is their copy
- Soylent is a complete meal — affordable, sustainable, and satisfying.
- We engineer our ever-evolving products to deliver convenient nutrition when you need it.
- If you’ve ever missed a meal, eaten something regrettable in the throes of hangry, or had no time to eat, Soylent is for you.
- In a world with a rapidly growing population, and rapidly diminishing resources, we all need access to nutrition that is cost-effective and easy to consume. We’re pro-GMO, pro-sustainability, and ready to change how the world thinks about food.
What can we buy in Canada right now?
- Soylent Drinks
  - A ready-to-drink meal offering 400 kcal, 28 vitamins and minerals, and 20g of plant-based protein.
  - Ordering is at a case at a time
    - 12 Bottles a case
    - One time purchase at $4.75 a bottle
      - $57 a case
    - Subscription rate is $4.28 a bottle
      - $51.30
      - Frequency at 15, 30, 45 and 60 days
  - Original
    - The flavor that started it all
    - Light, sweet, and velvety smooth
- - Chocolate
    - Rich, chocolatey flavor with real cacao powder.
- - Cafe Mocha
    - The chocolatey, robust coffee drink of your dreams.
    - Same ready-to-drink meal with an added caffeine boost to start your day.
    - When I had the drink back when it was called Coffiest, it tasted like black coffee in Soylent, which was good in my opinion
- Soylent Powder
  - 450 grams in a bag
  - 20g of protein and 28 vitamins and minerals per serving.
    - Recommended serving is 60 grams of powder
    - And each case has 35 meals worth of pwder
    - One time purchase at $2.51 per meal
      - $88 an order
    - Subscription at $2.09 a meal
      - $73.04 per order
      - Frequency at 15, 30, 45 and 60 days
    - Original
      - The complete-meal powder that started it all.
      - A light, sweet taste.
      - Mix Original into your favorite smoothie to create your own flavor profile or enjoy it on its own for a velvety-smooth meal.
    - Chocolate
      - Ideal for smoothies
- Accessories
  - First subscription gives you a pitcher and scoop
    - Which I no longer have
  - And there is a Soylent branded blender bottle
    - Our 20oz Soylent Blender Bottles are perfect for all your meal replacement powder needs.
    - Shake up 200 kcal or 400 kcal servings on the go, wherever you go.
    - For a limited time only, Soylent Blender Bottles ship with a 200 kcal scoop — perfect for easy measuring.
    - $11

Now this looks like a lot
- I am very grateful they put a foot back into Canada
- However, we are missing some products that are available to the United States
  - Soylent Drinks
    - Vanilla
      - Classic vanilla flavor with a sweet, subtle taste and no added caffeine
    - Strawberry
      - Our sweet strawberry flavor with a fruity finish.
    - Mint Chocolate
      - Minty chocolate deliciousness. Twist the cap and dive into our brand new flavor.
    - Brand New Soylent STACKED
      - Soylent Stacked is the first of its kind. This 11 oz complete energy drink is packed with 15g of plant protein and 36 essential nutrients, plus nootropics which improve focus, increases mental output, and gives you the nutrients your body needs.
    - And a variety pack to get 4 of each Cacao, Strawberry and Vanilla
  - Soylent Eats
    - These are little snack bars
      - 100 calorie mini meal serves up 5g of plant protein, 36 essential nutrients and probiotics.
    - They come in boxes of 30 squares
      - Chocolate Brownie
      - Salted Caramel
      - Citrus Berry
      - Variety Pack
      - And a sampler pack of 9 bars

Tidbits

Apple’s introduced a Mac Pro Wheels kit for everyone that bought a Mac Pro and were disappointed when it didn’t roll around wildly with no way to lock it down
- The kit goes for $700 USD, compared to the $300 static feet option, leading many to wonder- why are my computer’s wheels more expensive than my car’s tires?
With physical distancing expected to be in effect for the foreseeable future, Polygon’s gathered a bunch of really sweet stories from people going on blind island dates
- Animal Crossing has apparently become the latest great Tinder first date destination
Nintendo’s latest Switch system update has brought a bunch of quality-of-life improvements this week
- Changes include the ability to transfer games and DLC from the system’s memory to and from an SD card (though you still can’t move save data over), and the option to remap controller buttons at a global level (a big win for accessibility)
Nevada Gaming Control has approved gambling on three eSports events, so with physical sports being cancelled you can now bet on the 2020 League of Legends European Championship, the North American League of Legends Championship Series, and the Overwatch League
The official Star Wars website has announced that Episode I: Racer will be released on the Switch and PS4 on May 12th

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Thank you to Zane, he’s great and we want to make him and the rest of our fanily proud!

And thanks to all our ‘fanily’ that support us.

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We are a proud member of the Alberta Podcast Network powered by ATB

And talk to us in the comments!

1 2 »

Tag: third person

Free Games

Twitch

Swimsanity – Couch Party Edition

Optica

Epic Games

The Fall

Sony Play at Home 2021

March 25

ABZU

Enter the Gungeon

Rez Infinite

Subnautica

The Witness

PSVR

Astro Bot Rescue Mission

Moss

Thumper

Paper Beast

April 19

Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition

A state-backed group in China wants to get around App Tracking Transparency and track app users with a controversial new “China Advertising ID”, or CAID

Sony’s unveiled the planned controller for their next generation of PSVR, and it looks pretty slick

This Week In Gaming History

March 13 – 2012 – Yakuza: Dead Souls – PlayStation 3 (United States)

March 14 – 1986 – Night Fire – DOS

March 15 – 1997 – Snowboard Kids – Nintendo 64 (North America)

March 16 – 2010 – Metro 2033 – Windows, Xbox 360

March 17 – 1995 – Descent – DOS

March 18 – 1992 – Minesweeper – Windows 3.x

March 19 – 2007 – Tetris Evolution – Xbox 360

Tidbits

For more content, Patreon supports get access to upcoming ideas and more!

Free Games

Twitch

Blasphemous

Bomber Crew Deluxe

Sine Mora EX

Tengami

SkyDrift

Boomerang Fu

Xbox

Warface: Breakout

Vicious Attack Llama Apocalypse

Metal Slug 3

Playstation

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Remnant: From the Ashes

Maquette

Farpoint

Epic Games

Wargame: Red Dragon

Apple had to deal with some undeserved bad press this week as a story broke accusing them of locking a user’s AppleID due to missed Apple Card payments

There’s a fancy new version of Final Fantasy VII Remake coming to the PS5, with bonus DLC featuring Yuffie

This Week In Gaming History

February 27 – 2002 – Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure – GameBoy Advance

February 28 – 1997 – Turok: Dinosaur Hunter – Nintendo 64

March 1 – 2001 – Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider – PlayStation, Windows

March 2 – 2004 – Ninja Gaiden – Xbox

March 3 – 2017 -The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch, Wii U

March 4 – 2014 – South Park: The Stick of Truth – PS3, Windows, Xbox 360

March 5 – 2020 – Walking Simulator – Windows

Tidbits

Mini Review- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Would you like to know more?

For more content, Patreon supports get access to upcoming ideas and more!

Free Games

Twitch

The Academy: First Riddle

Epic Games

Sunless Sea

Bonus round: Sony’s announced the return of their Play At Home program, kicking off four months of Playstation offers on March 1st

Australia’s working on a law that would require any site linking to a news publication to pay for the privilege

There’s a proposed class action lawsuit in play alleging that Google lied about Stadia’s capabilities in order to lock in subscribers

Sony’s announced some details on their next-generation VR headset, and it sounds pretty slick

Everyone hoping for Anthem to join the ranks of No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XIV and rise from its ashes can now stop holding their breath- it’s officially cancelled

This Week In Gaming History

February 20 – 2003 – Train Tracking – Windows

February 21 – 2017 – Halo Wars 2 – Xbox One, Windows

February 22 – 1996 – Johnny Bazookatone – PlayStation, Sega Saturn, 3DO, DOS