Posts Tagged ‘video-game’

tFor a game with an almost cartoonish art style, Commandos 2: Men of Courage happens to be one of the most visceral and realistic recreations of the Second World War. Unlike the legions of gung-ho WW2 shoot-em-ups that have you blasting through waves of identikit baddies, the Commandos series rewards stealth, cunning, and guile. Instead of a one-man army, you get a crack squad of artfully differentiated commandos whose strengths and weaknesses contribute real depth to the gameplay.

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The Classics: ‘Commandos 2: Men of Courage’

Supergiant Games found early success with Bastion , an epic and melancholy action RPG released in 2011. Now, the studio has given us a first look at its next project : Transistor , which trades the fantasy-western setting of Bastion for a more overtly sci-fi design. While the gameplay and style looks like it follows in Bastion’s footsteps, Transistor concerns a young woman who gains ownership of a mysterious weapon — the Transistor — and must piece together its history while fleeing enemies who want to take it back.

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Watch the trailer for ‘Transistor,’ a lush sci-fi game from ‘Bastion’ creators Supergiant

Milk chocolate (Sugar. Milk. Chocolate. Cocoa.

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90 Seconds on The Verge: Facebook’s News Feed, Apple’s music delay, and a new merit badge

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Sandy Hook arcade practices healing through gaming

One year ago — almost to the day — the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Apple was testing an 8-inch iPad . In July, just days after Google’s announcement of the Nexus 7, it reiterated that a “smaller” iPad was coming . Those rumors, of course, foretold the launch of the iPad mini late last year. With these reports, Apple is sending a message Yesterday, it was The New York Times ’ turn: Apple is now said to be “experimenting” with a “watch-like device,” WSJ quickly corroborated the story.

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Why would Apple want to make an iWatch?

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates took to Reddit today for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. After describing Windows 8 as a ” huge advance ,” Gates also revealed he has ” tried all of Apple [sic] products .” According to Gates he’s currently using a Surface Pro and an 80-inch Windows 8 tablet, the same used by CEO Steve Ballmer . In fact, he even used the device to reply to Reddit comments. Other highlights include Gates describing WinFS, a file system that was supposed to debut in Vista, as a program or product that he wished had made it to market . “We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time,” said Gates

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Bill Gates hits Reddit for an AMA, replies using 80-inch Windows 8 tablet

The Man in the High Castle , Philip K. Dick’s classic novel about a world where Germany won World War II, is getting a Syfy mini-series, The New York Times reports . In a statement, Syfy said that the four-hour program would be written partly by Frank Spotnitz, a writer and eventual executive producer of The X-Files and co-producer of spinoff Millennium . Spotnitz helped create some of the most famous mythology-focused X-Files episodes, but he’s not the biggest name attached to the project: that’d be Ridley Scott, who will serve as an executive producer and will help adapt the book through his company Scott Free Productions.

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Ridley Scott and ‘X-Files’ producer Frank Spotnitz adapting ‘Man in the High Castle’ for TV

The Super Bowl’s not the only venue for commercials: Google just aired an ad for the Nexus 4 during the Grammys. Titled “Live in the Now,” the spot focuses on Google Now, with people in different cities around the world using the service to check weather, public transportation information, and get a little help with a foreign language translation. Take a look below.

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Google Now takes a trip around the world in Grammys commercial

David Cage doesn’t want you to play games. The man behind interactive experiences like Indigo Prophecy , Heavy Rain , and the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls says he’s had enough of titles that cater to children and teens. “I think we need to accept this idea of growing up and finally become adults,” he said at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas today. Standing in front of a room of video game industry executives, he challenged them to reinvent their work, with a nine-part manifesto titled “The Peter Pan Syndrome: The Industry That Refused to Grow Up.” “We have the same audience after 40 years” The primary message? Game developers need to stop building the same games over and over again

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‘Heavy Rain’ director David Cage challenges game industry to just grow up

Some puzzle games are about giving you simple rules and tools, then asking you to extrapolate how they’ll apply to increasingly mind-bending scenarios. Others, like the recently-released Antichamber , ask you to rethink even the simplest preconceptions about how your world works. Antichamber’s brightly colored, perspective-twisting world pairs time-worn platitudes and motivational clipart with puzzles that turn these proverbs on their heads — and make a mockery of anything you thought you knew about spatial reasoning. The game is normally $19.99, but it’s $14.99 through Steam until February 6th

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Play this: Escher-esque ‘Antichamber’ upends the puzzle game

Verizon Wireless today announced a pair of prepaid smartphone plans for “budget-minded” consumers. Both provide users with unlimited voice minutes and SMS messaging, but differ in terms of data caps. A $60 plan will net you 500MB of data, whereas spending $10 more will bring that limit to a much more manageable 2GB. Unfortunately the new prepaid options are only compatible with a range of 3G smartphones — Verizon isn’t letting you use any the carrier’s popular 4G LTE handsets on a prepaid basis. It claims “many” devices are compatible with the new plan, including various Android, (legacy) BlackBerry and iOS hardware

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Verizon rolls out new prepaid wireless plans, but only for 3G smartphones

Corrypt is an award-winning puzzle game from Michael Brough, the prolific indie dev behind the highly-regarded Vertex Dispenser and Glitch Tank . Released late last year, it’s a fresh take on the box-pushing Sokoban genre . Decked out with old-school graphics, Corrypt has you moving boxes in order to collect mushrooms, help out the local residents, and advance through a colorful dungeon. The twist is that boxes you’re trying to move stick to you — whether you’re moving away from or towards them — which is occasionally handy, but most of the time incredibly frustrating. The only way to let go of a box is to move sideways, and it’s this element that makes the puzzles very difficult and will keep you coming back for more

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Play this: ‘Corrypt’ is a fiendishly difficult box-pushing game with a twist

Samsung has just let loose a press release this evening before CES starts in earnest, revealing its very own wireless Bluetooth speaker and a few new home theater audio systems. The wireless speaker goes by the moniker DA-F60, and it follows a pattern that we think will be re-tread many times during CES. The DA-F60 thankfully uses the apt-X codec for wireless streaming over Bluetooth (rather than some lower-quality codecs), and it features NFC so you can sync your phone to the speaker painlessly. In addition, Samsung says the speaker can connect to Bluetooth-enabled TVs using a feature called “SoundShare.” The speaker is an attempt to offer something similar to Airplay, Apple’s successful and dead-simple syncing technology, and by coming… Continue reading…

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Samsung opens the wireless speaker floodgates with CES audio lineup

Social media was an important element of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign this past year, and it was driven in several cases by some extremely popular photographs. Now the White House has posted a photo album of some of the most memorable images taken of the President in 2012. Highlighting stunning work from the likes of White House photographer Pete Souza, the collection is not just a look at the highest office in the land — it’s a testament to the stirring power of exceptional photography as well. We’ve included some standouts below, but be sure to check out the entire gallery for yourself

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The best photos of President Obama in 2012

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for another edition of The Verge Mobile Show . But this week we’re shaking things up by hosting it a little early, at 3PM ET / 8PM GMT, to be exact. Got to keep you on your toes somehow, right? Anyways, you can expect to see the usual banter and ranting from your favorite Verge mobile editors, but this time before the sun actually disappears on the East Coast. Continue reading…

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The Verge Mobile Show is live today at 3PM ET / 8PM GMT

The next game from the creators of Infinity Blade will allow players to assume the role of a cartoon Barack Obama or Mitt Romney and beat up their opponent in a political debate using weapons, not words. The free iOS game Vote!!! awards players with a score that can be converted into votes which can be applied to either presidential candidate in a worldwide run for virtual presidency. Developers Chair Entertainment teamed up with Rock the Vote and the Video Game Voters Network to release the game for free on Thursday. While a bulk of the title is about running through three-stage battles between presidential candidates, the game also provides access to real-world voter resources and can even walk gamers through the process to vote. ” V..

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Beat up Obama, Romney in ‘Infinity Blade’ creator’s new political game

What’s really going on at OnLive, the streaming game company that reportedly laid off its entire staff today ? The official word is that the entire firm’s assets were acquired by a “newly-formed company” with “substantial funding,” and thus it’s business as usual for all… except, perhaps, for the number of individuals we saw leaving the Palo Alto headquarters with single white sheets of paper and boxes of personal possessions. What will become of the company and its employees

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OnLive’s new mystery owner is reportedly a single person, and other revelatory rumors

Lenovo’s CEO Yang Yuanqing isn’t worried about Microsoft’s upcoming Surface tablet eating into his sales. “[They’re] just one of our many competitors. We are still confident that we are providing much better hardware than our competitors including Microsoft,” he said during the company’s Q1 earnings call, reports CNET . It sounds like Yuanqing is gassed up over his company’s recent performance — net profit up 30 percent year over year on strong sales that leave it just a hair (0.7 percentage points) behind HP for most PC shipments worldwide.

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Lenovo CEO ready to take on Microsoft’s Surface, ‘just one of many competitors’

Germany has reopened its investigation of Facebook’s facial recognition database after failed attempts to persuade the company to revise its policies, according to the New York Times . The dispute centers around Facebook’s requirement that users opt-out of its facial recognition database, rather than opting-in as mandated by European Union law. Facebook suspended the practice for new users in July while it worked with EU officials, though it maintains that its regional headquarters in Dublin adheres to Ireland’s data privacy laws, having implemented changes outlined by an audit last year . Johannes Caspar, Germany’s data protection commissioner argues that the social network is violating the EU’s Article 29 Working Party decision which..

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Germany reopens Facebook facial recognition inquiry, Facebook defends its legal status

Google says that it’s aware of a sever error affecting some users who connect to Gmail using IMAP, and an active thread in the company’s Product Forums suggests that some have been suffering without their normal email connection for as long as two days. It’s unclear whether the problem is limited to the iPhone and iPad, though they certainly comprise a significant portion of Gmail’s IMAP users: the default Gmail account setup in iOS establishes an IMAP connection rather than POP or Exchange ActiveSync. Some commenters on the official forum are reporting that the problem is fixed, but as with many of Google’s services, it doesn’t seem to be rolled out to everyone just yet. In the meantime, the company reminds users that they can still use..

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Gmail IMAP errors leave some iOS users without normal email access

Apple’s been showing the results from a number of surveys today, and one expert witness just made one of the more intriguing statements we’ve heard: smartphone users would be willing to pay a $100 premium for the features Samsung is accused of copying. Dr. John Hauser, a professor of marketing at MIT, came to his conclusions after conducting an online survey, and found that the iOS “bounce-back” feature was worth a $39 premium to smartphone owners on its own; coupling the feature with tap-to-zoom and two finger gestures, he said, would bring that total to $100. He produced similar results for tablets; according to his study, bounce-back was worth $45 on a tablet, while the total for all features came in at $90

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Apple expert: smartphone owners are willing to pay $100 premium for features Samsung copied

ICANN Board Chairman and Internet Hall of Fame inductee Steve Crocker has been working with computer networks since before the internet existed, first as a UCLA graduate student and eventually as CEO of tech startup Shinkuro . Drawing on his early experience working with military network and internet precursor ARPANET in the 1960s and 1970s, he’s written a long and thoughtful response to L. Gordon Crovitz’s claim that government research begetting the internet was a “myth.” While Crocker is clear that he doesn’t think the internet could have been created without government funding and help, his piece is also a fascinating look into how early systems get built, regardless of who’s paying for them. You can also read “father of the internet”… Continue reading…

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ARPANET programmer and internet luminary Steve Crocker on how the internet was created

ASCIIvania is a fresh take on the “metroidvania” style that challenges players to shapeshift and solve word puzzles. You start off as a single letter that can scoot around the text-based map until you get your first power-up, the carat symbol, which allows you to jump. By collecting the other letters scattered around the map, you can complete more words, unlocking new rooms in the ASCIIvania underworld. The ultimate goal is to amass as many letters and power-ups as possible, giving you unlimited word-solving power

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Play this: solve word puzzles in the text-based underworld of ‘ASCIIvania’

Combining a puzzle game with role playing elements isn’t a new concept, but 10000000 has a distinct advantage over similar games that makes it a perfect fit for playing on your iPhone: it’s really, really fast. The game is all about exploring a dungeon, where you’ll find all manner of bad guys to battle and treasure chests to open. And in order to perform actions, you’ll need to match tiles at the bottom of the screen.

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Play this: ’10000000′

That was fast: in the scant few hours since Microsoft unveiled its Metro-style take on email , one million people have signed up for an account with Outlook.com. The service (which will ultimately replace Hotmail) features a revamped user interface that borrows heavily from Windows 8, direct integration with Facebook and Twitter and Skype conferencing —delivering a clear shot across the bow for Google and Gmail. It’s unclear whether this momentum will hold, or if the high level of interest is merely a surge of folks trying to get in on the ground floor (and secure a decipherable email address ). That said, over a million users in mere hours bodes well for the fledgling email platform. Continue reading…

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Outlook.com reels in over 1 million users mere hours after launch