After some leaked screenshots, Ubisoft decided to post a teaser trailer for their new Assassin's Creed game with the name Unity. Looks interesting and the revolutionary Paris setting should serve as an excellent location for parkour and assassination enthusiasts. On a side note, I'd bet a dollar that Ubisoft is doing the leaking themselves; Way too clean a drop of screenshots and then a relatively polished trailer less than a few days later.
UAI had the only FLAPPY bird game for more than 7 years. Then, with the lucky viral success of Dong Nguyen’s original clone “Flappy Bird”, based on UAI’s previously published title, complete with indistinguishable flight operating characteristics, and now thousands of copycat Flappy clones, there is widespread confusion. The confusion is so extreme that Ultimate Arcade’s own 8-year-old FLAPPY™ game is now often viewed as just another clone and is not yet being allowed by that name in the Apple iOS Store.
I would argue there is an easily distinguishable difference between the viral sensation Flappy Bird and this product. Decidedly telling is the fact that after 8 years, this is when they've decided to try and get their product on the iOS app store.
If you're in the market for a PS4, expect to go wanting for a few more months. Sony is hoping to catch up to demand by the vague timeline of "summer 2014".
Project Morpheus' tracking feels on a par with Oculus, even taking into account the advances brought about by the implementation of Crystal Cove. That's no doubt thanks to the PlayStation Camera's input, and the latency seems impressively low when moving your head. Even better, it allows you full 360-degree movement, letting you look behind you - a factor that's exploited to great effect in Sony London Studio's The Deep.
There is one other setback to Morpheus right now, though it's one that's likely to be remedied throughout the development process. Motion blur is much more pronounced on Morpheus than it is on Oculus' DK2, and image quality is also noticeably not quite on par. Both are running at 1080p, but Morpheus' decision to go with LCD displays rather than the OLED used on Oculus hurts it a little - good thing, then, that Sony's already looking at exploring OLED for its own device.
Some other considerations from Martin:
There are still reservations, though - The Deep and Castle were both running on PS4, and as relatively non-interactive experiences they still offered an exciting insight into what's possible on Morpheus. More traditional games like Eve Valkyrie and Thief though - the latter sadly wasn't available to play at today's demo - are currently running on PC. Whether they can be replicated on console hardware given the increased resource demands of feeding both eyes individual images at high resolution remains to be seen, and in aligning itself with the PC Oculus has partnered with a platform that's only going to get more powerful by the year, whereas Morpheus is currently working on one that's fixed and could find itself rapidly outgunned by its partner.
It's quite clear that with the quality of Sony's Morpheus project that VR is the new video game battleground.
Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, saw its profits more than double in 2013, when the studio earned 816 million Swedish kronor ($128 million), The Wall Street Journal reports.
I'd be interested to know what percentage of their earnings don't come directly from Minecraft. Scrolls hasn't exactly taken off in the face of tight competition from Hearthstone and other card battlers.
Morpheus is a visor style head-mounted display that works with the PlayStation Camera to deliver a virtual reality experience. Inertial sensors are built into the head mount unit and the Camera, which the headset requires to work, tracks head orientation and movement so as the player's head rotates the image of the virtual world rotates in real-time.
It's intriguing, but it's currently a prototype with no set price, no release date and no final specifications. Project Morpheus as it's being called (bad name), is seemingly far off and Sony will have to aggressively push this project forward if they want to parlay this reveal into anything that gamers will care about.
The big questions going forward will be:
How much will it cost?
How well does it work?
Will there be any software support?
I think there's an exciting opportunity here, but it will require delivering on the sort of things that video game peripherals rarely do.
So while there apparently will be no live video, you will be able to tune in for the Sony's "Innovation at PlayStation" panel through a few live blogs. A lot of hype is building for this event, there will be some disappointed faces if it's just an announcement for Knack 2.
Update: Video is definitely prohibited from being recorded at the event and there will be no live video feed from Sony. Sounds like Sony will be releasing their own select video clips from the event tomorrow.
Testimony KeSPA took from teammates of player Cheon Min-Ki... support his claim that their team's manager intended to place heavy bets against their League of Legends matches, once they had acquired a strong reputation, and then direct them to throw those matches. The proceeds from the illegal bets, Cheon alleged, were to have gone toward salaries living and training expenses that, instead of being paid by a sponsor, their manager had been secretly covering with a loan.
I don't claim to know much about eSports, but there seem to have been quite a few stories circulating recently about financial improprieties going on.
Rumours have been freely circulating that Sony is going to be showing off its Oculus Rift competitor tonight at GDC. The video game industry is littered with the bodies of crappy peripherals, but VR has been making a credible push over the last couple years. Could Sony be the company to finally deliver an affordable and high performance headset? We'll get a better sense of that tonight, though I expect much of the event to be done under some sort of NDA embargo.
Polygon plays Nom Nom Galaxy and it is every bit as crazy as the trailer looked. A real time soup making, business management, base building and space exploration game is exactly what the game market was waiting for.