gaming – Page 3

Microsoft Copilot will watch you play Minecraft, tell you what you’re doing wrong

gaming, Microsoft Copilot, minecraft / Ari B / May 21, 2024

Parasocial gaming department —

Microsoft demo is like chatting with GameFAQs when you don’t have a friend to hang with.

Kyle Orland – May 21, 2024 4: 37 pm UTC

In the recent past, you'd have to rely on your kid sibling to deliver <em>Minecraft</em> commentary like “Oh no, it’s a zombie. Run!”” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/zombie-800×429.png”></img><figcaption>
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Longtime gamers (and/or Game Grumps fans) likely know that even single-player games can be a lot more fun with a friend hanging out nearby to offer advice, shoot the breeze, or just offer earnest reactions to whatever’s happening on screen. Now, Microsoft is promising that its GhatGPT-4o-powered Copilot system will soon offer an imitation of that pro-social experience even for Minecraft players who don’t have any human friends available to watch them play.

In a pair of social media posts Monday, Microsoft highlighted how “real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot” can enhance an otherwise solitary Minecraft experience. In the first demo, the disembodied copilot voice tells the player how to craft a sword, walking him through the process of gathering some wood or stone to go with the sticks sitting in his inventory. In another, the AI identifies a zombie in front of the player and gives the (seemingly obvious) advice to run away from the threat and “make sure it can’t reach you” by digging underground or building a tower of blocks.

Real time conversations with your AI companion Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o. pic.twitter.com/Ug7EWv2sah

— Microsoft Copilot (@MSFTCopilot) May 20, 2024

These kinds of in-game pointers aren’t the most revolutionary use of conversational AI—even a basic in-game tutorial/reference system or online walkthrough could deliver the same basic information, after all. Still, the demonstration stands out for just how that information is delivered to the player through a natural language conversation that doesn’t require pausing the gameplay even briefly.

The key moment highlighting this difference is near the end of one of the video demos, when the Copilot AI offers a bit of encouragement to the player: “Whew, that was a close one. Great job finding shelter!” That’s the point when the system transitions from a fancy voice-controlled strategy guide to an ersatz version of the kind of spectator that might be sitting on your couch or watching your Twitch stream. It creates the real possibility of developing a parasocial relationship with the Copilot guide that is not really a risk when consulting a text file on GameFAQs, for instance (though I think the Copilot reactions will have to get a bit less inane to really feel like a valued partner-in-gaming).

Just hanging out with my AI buddy

It’s unclear from the video clips whether Copilot is reading data directly from the Minecraft instance or simply reacting to the same information the player is seeing. But the social media posts came the same day as Microsoft’s announcement of “Recall,” a coming feature that “take[s] images of your active screen every few seconds” to provide a persistent “memory” of everything you do on the computer. That feature will be exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which use an integrated Neural Processing Unit for on-device processing of many common generative AI tasks.

Microsoft’s Minecraft copilot demo brings to mind some of the similar conversations that OpenAI showed off during last week’s live demo of ChatGPT-4o. But the artificial game-adjacent conversation here sounds significantly more robotic and direct than the lifelike, emotional responses in ChatGPT’s presentation. Then again, ChatGPT has come under fire from actress Scarlett Johansson for using a voice that sounds too much like her performance in a 2013 movie about a conversational AI. Microsoft might be on safer ground sticking with a voice that is more obviously artificial here.

The casual cursing is what really makes an AI gaming buddy feel real.

Speaking of Her, we can’t help but think of one particular scene in that movie where Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore asks for gaming advice both from the titular AI and a hilariously potty-mouthed NPC. Maybe Microsoft can add a casual cursing module to its Copilot gaming companion to really capture the feeling of hanging out with a dorm room buddy over a late-night gaming session.

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Songs of Conquest is the Heroes of Might & Magic rebirth we all deserve

gaming, heroes of might and magic, heroes of might and magic III, songs of conquest, strategy games, turn based strategy game, turn-based, turn-based strategy / Ari B / May 20, 2024

Just one more turn, with dozens of things in it —

Every choice in this game has a cost. Choosing to play it seems like a good bet.

Kevin Purdy – May 20, 2024 4: 00 pm UTC

Hexagonal battlefield covered in fire and magma. — Enlarge / Battles get a wee bit involved as you go on in *Songs of Conquest*.

Coffee Stain Publishing

There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.

I have played it on just about every PC I’ve owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.

With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren’t too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it’s hard to imagine you won’t find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.

Songs of Conquest launch trailer.

Songs of Conquest has you move your horse-riding Casters (the Heroes of its inspiration) and their armies around a world map, using each limited movement point to liberate a new resource, pick up some treasure, get a temporary power-up, or engage in battle. When it’s battle time, you switch to a hexagonal grid, where your troops trade blows and you choose spells so your Caster can help. Win the battle (either manually or with an automatic “quick” decision), unlock a new area, harvest new resources, recruit more troops, and repeat until the map is clear or some other condition is met. You’ll get multiple Casters, new kinds of troops, and tons of new spells and artifacts as you progress, and you’ll follow a very swords-and-dragons story.

Moving click by click through a dark world, choosing paths, stopping by fountains for temporary boosts—the overworld is heavy with Heroes of Might & Magic III memories.

Coffee Stain Publishing
But not everything is the same. Building your central hub is more visually appealing, and likely more complex as you go on.

Coffee Stain Publishing
Your caster can do a lot to affect battle outcomes. You’ll have complete control over which spells they can wield, branching off into different schools of magic.

Coffee Stain Publishing
A map editor lets you torture your friends and random downloaders with constant which-way-to-go decisions.

Coffee Stain Publishing
The game’s campaigns have short cinematics and evocative stills.

Coffee Stain Publishing

The art is a mixture of intentionally granular (and pleasant) pixel art, throwback scroll-and-stone interface elements, and cutscenes and dramatic stills with a deliberate hand-painted look to them. Even if each element looks nice, I’m glad the game mixes it up, and you get a break from each. The properly medieval music seems well done, although it’s at a disadvantage, as my brain is making 45 decisions per minute and tends to block out brass, strings, and choirs.

There are four campaigns in the game, each with its own lands, enemy casters and units, spells, and lots of other new things to uncover and throw into your mental strategy RAM. It’s a good variety, especially combined with the difficulty and other campaign options you can set. Coming to this game from HoMM 3 memories, I’ve found the variety of map items, town/castle building, and Caster types new and engaging. My biggest quibble with the game is that managing the spells and upgrades of the Casters is too rich a field for me, somehow just one rich system over the line. Deciding which type of magic a Caster should specialize in and remembering the huge variety of spells available to put into their quickbar overwhelmed me.

As I noted up top, however, I’m not actually good at these games, I just enjoy the spell they put on me. Songs of Conquest is a rich new chapter for Heroes of Might & Magic fans, but it’s also a good jumping-in point if you’ve never been tempted before by the series with the unwieldy title and harsh difficulty ramp. Unlike your Casters, you can roam about its thousand little things at whatever pace you like.

Listing image by Coffee Stain Publishing

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The Apple TV is coming for the Raspberry Pi’s retro emulation box crown

Apple, Apple TV, Emulation, gaming, iOS, retroarch, tvos / Mike M. / May 18, 2024

watch out, raspberry pi —

Apple’s restrictions will still hold it back, but there’s a lot of possibility.

Andrew Cunningham – May 17, 2024 9: 43 pm UTC

Enlarge / The RetroArch app installed in tvOS.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone’s vibrant app and game library.

That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.

So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.

Downloading and using RetroArch on the Apple TV is a lot like using it on any other platform it supports, for better or worse. ROM files can be uploaded using a browser connected to the Apple TV’s IP address or hostname, which will pop up the first time you launch the RetroArch app. From there, you’re only really limited by the list of emulators that the Apple TV version of the app supports.

The main benefit of using the Apple TV hardware for emulation is that even older models have substantially better CPU and GPU performance than any Raspberry Pi; the first-gen Apple TV 4K and its Apple A10X chip date back to 2017 and still do better than a Pi 5 released in 2023. Even these older models should be more than fast enough to support advanced video filters, like Run Ahead, to reduce wireless controller latency and higher-than-native-resolution rendering to make 3D games look a bit more modern.

Beyond the hardware, tvOS is also a surprisingly capable gaming platform. Apple has done a good job adding and maintaining support for new Bluetooth gamepads in recent releases, and even Nintendo’s official Switch Online controllers for the NES, SNES, and N64 are all officially supported as of late 2022. Apple may have added this gamepad support primarily to help support its Apple Arcade service, but all of those gamepads work equally well with RetroArch.

At the risk of stating the obvious, another upside of using the Apple TV for retro gaming is that you can also still use it as a modern 4K video streaming box when you’re finished playing your games. It has well-supported apps from just about every streaming provider, and it supports all the DRM that these providers insist on when you’re trying to stream high-quality 4K video with modern codecs. Most Pi gaming distributions offer the Kodi streaming software, but it’s frankly outside the scope of this article to talk about the long list of caveats and add-ons you’d need to use to attempt using the same streaming services the Apple TV can access.

Obviously, there are trade-offs. Pis have been running retro games for a decade, and the Apple TV is just starting to be able to do it now. Even with the loosened App Store restrictions, Apple still has other emulation limitations relative to a Raspberry Pi or a PC.

The biggest one is that emulators on Apple’s platforms can’t use just-in-time (JIT) code compilation, needed for 3D console emulators like Dolphin. These restrictions make the Apple TV a less-than-ideal option for emulating newer consoles—the Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation Portable, and Sega Saturn are the newest consoles RetroArch supports on the Apple TV, cutting out newer things like the GameCube and Wii, Dreamcast, and PlayStation 2 that are all well within the capabilities of Apple’s chips. Apple also insists nebulously that emulators must be for “retro” consoles rather than modern ones, which could limit the types of emulators that are available.

With respect to RetroArch specifically, there are other limitations. Though RetroArch describes itself as a front-end for emulators, its user interface is tricky to navigate, and cluttered with tons of overlapping settings that make it easy to break things if you don’t know what you’re doing. Most Raspberry Pi gaming distros use RetroArch, but with a front-end-for-a-front-end like EmulationStation installed to make RetroArch a bit more accessible and easy to learn. A developer could release an app that included RetroArch plus a separate front-end, but Apple’s sandboxing restrictions would likely prevent anyone from releasing an app that just served as a more user-friendly front-end for the RetroArch app.

Regardless, it’s still pretty cool to be able to play retro games on an Apple TV’s more advanced hardware. As more emulators make their way to the App Store, the Apple TV’s less-fussy software and the power of its hardware could make it a compelling alternative to a more effort-intensive Raspberry Pi setup.

The Apple TV is coming for the Raspberry Pi’s retro emulation box crown Read More »

Leaks from Valve’s Deadlock look like a pressed sandwich of every game around

deadlock, DOTA, dota 2, gaming, overwatch, smite, Team Fortress 2, Tower Defense, tyler mcvicker, valorant, valve / Mike M. / May 18, 2024

Deadlock isn’t the most original name, but trademarks are hard —

Is there something new underneath a whole bunch of familiar game elements?

Kevin Purdy – May 17, 2024 8: 36 pm UTC

Shelves at Valve's offices, as seen in 2018, with a mixture of artifacts from Half-Life, Portal, Dota 2, and other games. — Enlarge / Valve has its own canon of games full of artifacts and concepts worth emulating, as seen in a 2018 tour of its offices.

Sam Machkovech

“Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die.”

That’s how notable Valve leaker “Gabe Follower” describes Deadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out.

The game has been known as “Neon Prime” and “Citadel” at prior points. It’s a “Competitive third-person hero-based shooter,” with six-on-six battles across a map with four “lanes.” That allows for some of the “Tower defense mechanics” mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with “fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite.” The maps reference a “modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life),” after “bad feedback” about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.

Since testers started sharing Deadlock screenshots all over the place, here’s ones I can verify, featuring one of the heroes called Grey Talon. pic.twitter.com/KdZSRxObSz

— ‎Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) May 17, 2024

Valve doesn’t release games often, and the games it does release are often in development for long periods. Deadlock purportedly started development in 2018, two years before Half-Life: Alyx existed. That the game has now seemingly reached a closed (though not closed enough) “alpha” playtesting phase, with players in the “hundreds,” could suggest release within a reasonable time. Longtime Valve watcher (and modder, and code examiner) Tyler McVicker suggests in a related video that Deadlock has hundreds of people playing in this closed test, and the release is “about to happen.”

McVicker adds to the descriptor pile-on by noting that it’s “team-based,” “hero-based,” “class-based,” and “personality-driven.” It’s an attempt, he says, to “bring together all of their communities under one umbrella.”

Tyler McVicker’s discussion of the leaked Deadlock content, featuring … BioShock Infinite footage.

Many of Valve’s games do something notable to push gaming technology and culture forward. Half-Life brought advanced scripting, physics, and atmosphere to the “Doom clones” field and forever changed it. Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 lead the way in team multiplayer dynamics. Dota 2 solidified and popularized MOBAs, and Half-Life: Alyx gave VR on PC its killer app. Yes, there are Artifact moments, but they’re more exception than rule.

Following any of those games seems like a tall order, but Valve’s track record speaks for itself. I think players like me, who never took to Valorant or Overwatch or the like, should reserve judgment until the game can be seen in its whole. I have to imagine that there’s more to Deadlock than a pile of very familiar elements.

Leaks from Valve’s Deadlock look like a pressed sandwich of every game around Read More »

How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time

C#, coding, decompilation, gaming, Mario, n64, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, pc ports, porting, Zelda / Mike M. / May 17, 2024

Enlarge / “N-tel (64) Inside”

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In recent years, we’ve reported on multiple efforts to reverse-engineer Nintendo 64 games into fully decompiled, human-readable C code that can then become the basis for full-fledged PC ports. While the results can be impressive, the decompilation process can take years of painstaking manual effort, meaning only the most popular N64 games are likely to get the requisite attention from reverse engineers.

Now, a newly released tool promises to vastly reduce the amount of human effort needed to get basic PC ports of most (if not all) N64 games. The N64 Recompiled project uses a process known as static recompilation to automate huge swaths of the labor-intensive process of drawing C code out of N64 binaries.

While human coding work is still needed to smooth out the edges, project lead Mr-Wiseguy told Ars that his recompilation tool is “the difference between weeks of work and years of work” when it comes to making a PC version of a classic N64 title. And parallel work on a powerful N64 graphic renderer means PC-enabled upgrades like smoother frame rates, resolution upscaling, and widescreen aspect ratios can be added with little effort.

Inspiration hits

Mr-Wiseguy told Ars he got his start in the N64 coding space working on various mod projects around 2020. In 2022, he started contributing to the then-new RT64 renderer project, which grew out of work on a ray-traced Super Mario 64 port into a more generalized effort to clean up the notoriously tricky process of recreating N64 graphics accurately. While working on that project, Mr-Wiseguy said he stumbled across an existing project that automates the disassembly of NES games and another that emulates an old SGI compiler to aid in the decompilation of N64 titles.

YouTuber Nerrel lays out some of the benefits of Mr-Wiseguy’s N64 recompilation tool.

“I realized it would be really easy to hook up the RT64 renderer to a game if it could be run through a similar static recompilation process,” Mr-Wiseguy told Ars. “So I put together a proof of concept to run a really simple game and then the project grew from there until it could run some of the more complex games.”

A basic proof of concept for Mr-Wiseguy’s idea took only “a couple of weeks at most” to get up and running, he said, and was ready as far back as November of 2022. Since then, months of off-and-on work have gone into rounding out the conversion code and getting a recompiled version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask ready for public consumption.

Trust the process

At its most basic level, the N64 recompilation tool takes a raw game binary (provided by the user) and reprocesses every single instruction directly and literally into corresponding C code. The N64’s MIPS instruction set has been pretty well-documented over years of emulation work, so figuring out how to translate each individual opcode to its C equivalent isn’t too much of a hassle.

Wave Race 64.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/recomprt2-640×360.png” width=”640″>

Enlarge / An early beta of the RT64 renderer shows how ray-tracing shadows and reflections might look in a port of Wave Race 64.

The main difficulty, Mr-Wiseguy said, can be figuring out where to point the tool. “The contents of the [N64] ROM can be laid out however the developer chose to do so, which means you have to find where code is in the ROM before you can even start the static recompilation process,” he explained. And while N64 emulators automatically handle games that load and unload code throughout memory at runtime, handling those cases in a pre-compiled binary can add extra layers of complexity.

How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time Read More »

Sony listing hints at native, upscaled PS2 emulation on the PS5

Emulation, gaming, implicit creations, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, ps2, ps5 / Mike M. / May 16, 2024

Where’s Fantavision? —

Download promo promises “up-rendering, rewind, quick save, and custom video filters.”

Kyle Orland – May 16, 2024 3: 45 pm UTC

Years ago, Sony started making a select handful of “PlayStation 2 Classics” available as emulated downloads on the PlayStation 4. Now, there are signs that certain PS2 games will be similarly available for native download on the PS5, complete with new features like “up-rendering, rewind, quick save, and custom video filters.”

The hint at Sony’s coming PS2 download plans comes via a new PlayStation Network listing for the 2002 release Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which recently appeared on tracking site PSDeals (as noticed by Gematsu). That site draws from unpublished data from the PSN servers, such as this thumbnail image that recently appeared on the playstation.com servers, and lists a planned June 11 release for the emulated Clone Wars port.

So far, this is nothing out of the ordinary. But near the bottom of the boilerplate, the listing notes that “this title has been converted from the PlayStation 2 version to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles and provides newly added features [emphasis added].” That’s a marked difference from earlier “PS2 on PS4” downloadable releases, which only say that they were “converted from the original PlayStation 2 version to the PS4 system.”

A new emulator for a new generation

Previous PS2 games released as PlayStation Classics could be played on the PS5 via the newer system’s PS4 backward compatibility, of course. And those titles already looked relatively decent on modern displays thanks to near-HD upscaling at solid frame rates. But new “up-rendering” designed for the 4K-capable PS5 could make these aging 3D titles look even better on high-end TVs, even if low-resolution textures originally designed for 2000s-era CRTs may still look dated. And other new features like “rewind, quick save, and custom video filters” promise nice improvements over the relatively bare-bones PS2 emulation previously available on the PS4.

A look at Implicit Creations’ existing PS1 emulation efforts on the PS5.

Those same features (and modern additions like trophies) are also currently offered on select PS1 titles that have been available in native PS5 ports in recent months. That’s thanks to the work of Implicit Conversions, a retro-focused porting company that has recently been working with Sony to add PS1 support to its multi-platform Syrup Emulation Engine.

Implicit Conversions recently included the PS2 on a list of consoles supported by the Syrup Engine and said on LinkedIn that it is “working with clients to bring NES, PS1, PSP, and PS2 games to the PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox [emphasis added].” In a March interview with Time Extension, the company said it “can’t deny or confirm anything about PS2 [emulation on PS5],” but the very familiar wording of this leaked Clone Wars listing certainly suggests the same company is behind this new PS2 porting effort as well.

Of course, the ability to download select PS2 games to the PS5 falls well short of many players’ dream of simply inserting and playing an existing PS2 disc on their newest Sony console. In 2018, though, hackers opened up the PlayStation Classics emulator and got it running generic PS2 games on the PS4 (compatibility is a bit hit or miss, however). That same emulator has also proven useful in helping hackers unlock some interesting exploits on the PS5. So who knows—the community may be able to hack-in wider PS5 support for PS2 game discs eventually.

Sony listing hints at native, upscaled PS2 emulation on the PS5 Read More »

Game dev says contract barring “subjective negative reviews” was a mistake

contract, ethics, gaming, marvel rivals, NetEase, Review / Ryan Harris / May 13, 2024

Be nice, or else —

Early streamers agreed not to “belittle the gameplay” or “make disparaging… comments.”

Kyle Orland – May 13, 2024 3: 59 pm UTC

Artist's conception of NetEase using a legal contract to try to stop a wave of negative reviews of its closed alpha. — Enlarge / Artist’s conception of NetEase using a legal contract to try to stop a wave of negative reviews of its closed alpha.

NetEase

The developers of team-based shooter Marvel Rivals have apologized for a contract clause that made creators promise not to provide “subjective negative reviews of the game” in exchange for early access to a closed alpha test.

The controversial early access contract gained widespread attention over the weekend when streamer Brandon Larned shared a portion on social media. In the “non-disparagement” clause shared by Larned, creators who are provided with an early download code are asked not to “make any public statements or engage in discussions that are detrimental to the reputation of the game.” In addition to the “subjective negative review” example above, the clause also specifically prohibits “making disparaging or satirical comments about any game-related material” and “engaging in malicious comparisons with competitors or belittling the gameplay or differences of Marvel Rivals.”

Extremely disappointed in @MarvelRivals.

Multiple creators asked for key codes to gain access to the playtest and are asked to sign a contract.

The contract signs away your right to negatively review the game.

Many streamers have signed without reading just to play

Insanity. pic.twitter.com/c11BUDyka9

— Brandon Larned (@A_Seagull) May 12, 2024

In a Discord post noticed by PCGamesN over the weekend, Chinese developer NetEase apologized for what it called “inappropriate and misleading terms” in the contract. “Our stand is absolutely open for both suggestions and criticisms to improve our games, and… our mission is to make Marvel Rivals better [and] satisfy players by those constructive suggestions.”

In a follow-up posted to social media this morning, NetEase went on to “apologize for any unpleasant experiences or doubts caused by the miscommunication of these terms… We actively encourage Creators to share their honest thoughts, suggestions, and criticisms as they play. All feedback, positive and negative, ultimately helps us craft the best experience for ourselves and the players.” NetEase says it is making “adjustments” to the contract “to be less restrictive and more Creator-friendly.”

What can you say, and when can you say it?

Creators and press outlets (including Ars) routinely agree to embargoes or sign review and/or non-disclosure agreements to protect sensitive information about a game before its launch. Usually, these agreements are focused on when certain information and early opinions about a game can be shared. These kinds of timing restrictions can help a developer coordinate a game’s marketing rollout and also prevent early reviewers from having to rush through a game to get a lucrative “first review” up on the Internet.

Sometimes, companies use embargo agreements to urge or prevent reviewers from sharing certain gameplay elements or story spoilers until a game’s release in an effort to preserve a sense of surprise for the player base. There are also sometimes restrictions on how many and/or what kinds of screenshots or videos can be shared in early coverage for similar reasons. But restrictions on what specific opinions can be shared about a game are practically unheard of in these kinds of agreements.

Nearly a decade ago, Microsoft faced criticism for a partnership with a Machinima video marketing campaign that paid video commentators for featuring Xbox One game footage in their content. That program, which was aped by Electronic Arts at the time, restricted participants from saying “anything negative or disparaging about Machinima, Xbox One, or any of its games.”

In response to the controversy, Microsoft said that it was adding disclaimers to make it clear these videos were paid promotions and that it “was not aware of individual contracts Machinima had with their content providers as part of this promotion and we didn’t provide feedback on any of the videos…”

In 2017, Atlus threatened to use its copyright controls to take down videos that spoiled certain elements of Persona 5, even after the game’s release.

Game dev says contract barring “subjective negative reviews” was a mistake Read More »

Cryptmaster is a dark, ridiculous RPG test of your typing and guessing skills

dungeon crawler, dungeon crawlers, gaming, RPG, text games, ultima underground, wizardry, word games / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

A different kind of text adventure —

Ask a necromancer to lick a shield. Type out “HIT,” “YELL,” “ZAP.” It’s funny.

Kevin Purdy – May 11, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Cryptmaster screenshot showing the player typing out — Enlarge / Sometimes you gotta get your nose in there to remember the distinct aroma of 1980s RPG classics.

Akupara Games

There are people who relish the feeling of finally nailing down a cryptic clue in a crossword. There are also people unduly aggravated by a puzzlemaster’s puns and clever deceptions. I’m more the latter kind. I don’t even play the crossword—or Wordle or Connections or Strands—but my wife does, and she’ll feed me clues. Without fail, they leave me in some strange state of being relieved to finally get it, yet also keyed up and irritated.

Cryptmaster, out now on Steam, GOG, and Itch.io for Windows, seems like the worst possible game for people like me, and yet I dig it. It is many things at once: a word-guessing game, a battle typing (or shouting) challenge, a party-of-four first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, and a text-prompt adventure, complete with an extremely goofy sense of humor. It’s also in stark black and white. You cannot fault this game for a lack of originality, even while it evokes Wizardry, Ultima Underground, and lots of other arrow-key-moving classics, albeit with an active tongue-in-cheek filter.

Cryptmaster announcement trailer.

The Cryptmaster in question has woken up four role-playing figures—fighter, rogue, bard, and wizard—to help him escape from his underground lair to the surface, for reasons that must be really keen and good. As corpses, you don’t remember any of your old skills, but you can guess them. What’s a four-letter action that a fighter might perform, or a three-letter wizard move? Every time you find a box or treasure, the Cryptmaster opens it, gives you a letter count, then lets you ask for clues. “SMELL,” you type, and he says it has that wonderful old-paper smell. “LOOK,” and he notes that there are writings and drawings on one side. Guess “SCROLL,” and he adds those letters to your characters’ next ability clues. Guess wrong, well, better luck next time.

Okay, so none of my characters can get really good prices through group buying, got it.

Akupara Games
Gelatinous cubes, of course, but this one makes you think on the fly about which verbs you can use.

Akupara Games
A lot of the characters in Cryptmaster are, well, characters.

Akupara Games
In case you didn’t get enough word games from the main gameplay, there is a mini card game you can play with its own letters-and-words mechanics.

Akupara Games
Uncovering more verbs reveals more of your dead characters’ past lives.

Akupara Games

Once you’ve got a few verbs, you’ll want to learn them and figure out how they fit together, because you’ll have to fight some things. Combat is all about typing but also remembering your words and juggling cooldowns, attack, defense, and ability costs. Strike with your fighter, backstab with the rogue, fling a spell from the wizard, and have your bard reset the fighter’s cooldown, all while a baddie very slowly winds up and swings at random party members. Some fights can be avoided by maneuvering around them, but successful fights also let you choose another letter to potentially reveal new verbs. Apologies for the somewhat vague descriptions here, but I’m trying not to give away any words.

There are a few other mechanics to learn, like smashing wall-crawling bugs to gather their ability-powering essence, and defiling shrines to better suit your undead needs. But let’s talk about the Cryptmaster. Saying the character is “voiced” by the game’s writer and co-designer, Lee Williams, truly undersells it. As with some of the best adventure games, Williams and coder/designer/artist Paul Hart have anticipated so, so many things you might type in when prompted to guess, ask, or interact with their gloomy little world. Maybe there’s a point at which the Cryptmaster—a far more dour version of the HBO Cryptkeeper eternally disappointed in you—stops being surprising in his responses. I have yet to find it after a few hours of play. (How the team pulled off such a huge response range is detailed in an interview at Game Developer.)

Go ahead and recapture some of your childhood sense of wonder: Swear at the Cryptmaster. You won’t be disappointed.

You can play the game in turn-based mode, removing the pressure of remembering and typing out actions, but it’s not the recommended setting. While I played with only typing and relished the chance to give my mechanical keyboard a workout, you can also play with voice prompts. If you’re not sure if this is the kind of game for you, there’s a free demo on Steam that should clue you in.

Was that a pun? Maybe. Cryptmaster gave me a bit more appreciation for word-guessing games—the kind with enjoyments that are not easily, shall we say, spelled out.

Cryptmaster is a dark, ridiculous RPG test of your typing and guessing skills Read More »

Manor Lords’ medieval micromanagement means making many messes

city-builder, early access, gaming, manor lords / Ryan Harris / May 10, 2024

Enlarge / This peaceful, pastoral scene actually represents a ton of hard work!

Slavic Magic

Do you ever look around at modern civilization and boggle at the sheer complexity of it all? Do you ever think about the generations of backbreaking labor needed to turn acres and acres of untamed wilderness into the layers of interconnected systems needed to provide basic necessities—much less luxuries—to both early settlers and their generations of descendants?

All that infrastructure work is much harder to take for granted after playing Manor Lords. The Early Access version of the game—which netted a million Steam sales in its first 24 hours last month—forces you to do a lot of the heavy lifting that many other city builders tend to gloss over. And while there are still a lot of Early Access rough spots, what’s already there can make you appreciate just how hard it is to build a functioning society from nothing but raw materials and hard labor.

Let go of my hand

In many other city builders, you act as something of a detached, bureaucratic god. Lay down some roads, set aside some zoning, and watch as the microscopic masses automatically fill in the details of the housing, commerce, and industry needed to create a functional society.

Not so in Manor Lords, where micromanagement is essential to survival. The five starting families in your initial settlement must be specifically guided to their tasks, spreading themselves thin between farming, resource gathering, and construction before the harsh winter sets in. There’s no easy residential zoning here—you have to lay out the four corners of every individual “burgage plot” that will be used to house a single family.

Enlarge / Getting your settlement this thriving takes a lot of learning by doing.

Slavic Magic

Assigning settlers to their necessary tasks isn’t exactly a “set it and forget it” matter, either. You have to direct your hard-working families’ efforts to where they’re most needed, as the town’s requirements change with the seasons. This is especially true throughout that all-important first harvest season, where the meager stocks of bread you start don’t go nearly as far as you might like.

And don’t expect Manor Lords to hold your hand through a first tutorial run, either. The Early Access version decidedly does not instruct you on the basics of survival, throwing your settlers into an open clearing with minimal tooltip instructions for what you need to do. That means figuring out the correct mix of agriculture, mining, and construction needed for survival can be a matter of trial and error in the early going.

Learning the hard way

My first run at building a Manor Lords settlement ended in a disaster of harvest timing. After building my first field and farmhouse, I went multiple in-game months before realizing I had to specifically tell my settlers to start planting wheat for the coming harvest. By the time I forced a meager early harvest, my citizens were already going hungry, and I started over so I didn’t have to watch them slowly starve.

I started the planting earlier in my second run, but my meager group of settlers still started going hungry in the summer, months before the wheat would be ready to harvest. This time, I forced my citizens to tough it out through the lean months, building a windmill and a communal oven to be ready to make delicious bread when the time came. But when the harvest started, those buildings steadfastly refused to start processing the wheat and baking the food my citizens desperately needed.

I had to consult the Internet to figure out that my farm workers were mysteriously not threshing the gathered wheat so it could move down the bread production line. Forcing the farmers to focus their work on the farmhouse somehow shocked them out of this reverie, but not before the hungry citizens had tanked the approval level needed to help my settlement grow.

Manor Lords’ medieval micromanagement means making many messes Read More »

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

adventure games, cassette, cassette tapes, gaming, Text Adventures, text games, vintage computers, zx spectrum / Blake Jones / May 9, 2024

Cassettes are back, baby —

Celebrating radio waves, magnetic tape heads, and smuggled 8-bit computers.

Kevin Purdy – May 8, 2024 8: 13 pm UTC

Kontrabant 2 title image on ZX Spectrum — Enlarge / In 1984, the year 2000 was so promising, students made entire games promising to take you there.

Radio Student

Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

By the time you read this, it’s likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9: 30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

<em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.” height=”388″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant3.jpg” width=”324″></img><figcaption>
<p><em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.</p>
<p>Radio Student</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>It’s the 40th anniversary of <em>Kontrabant 2</em>, which was originally published by Radio Študent, both in physical copies and in similar over-the-air fashion. The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe. Smuggling was something that lots of Yugoslavs did, in somewhat casual fashion, and it inspired <em>Kontrabant</em> and its sequel, text adventure games with some graphics.</p>
<p>That I understand any of this is thanks to Vlado Vince, a Croatian/Yugoslavia native who wrote about Yugoslavian adventure games for a Spanish magazine, Club de Aventuras AD, and <a href= — A “Yugosaurus” in *Kontrabant 2*.

Radio Student/Vlado Vince

A “Yugosaurus” in *Kontrabant 2*.

Radio Student/Vlado Vince

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia Read More »

Court rules against Activision Blizzard in $23.4M patent dispute

Activision Blizzard, Boeing, gaming, Networking, patent, troll / Ryan Harris / May 8, 2024

pay up —

Activision plans appeal, says it uses different network tech in its games.

Kyle Orland – May 8, 2024 2: 49 pm UTC

Acceleration Bay says <em>World of Warcraft</em>‘s networking code infringes on a patent originally filed by Boeing.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/wowcrowd-800×450.png”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=

A jury has found Activision Blizzard liable for $23.4 million in damages in a patent infringement lawsuit first brought to court in 2015.

The case centers on patents first filed by Boeing in 2000, one that describes a “distributed game environment” across a host and multiple computers and another that describes a simple method for disconnecting from such a network. Those patents were acquired in 2015 by Acceleration Bay, which accused Activision Blizzard of using infringing technology to develop World of Warcraft and at least two Call of Duty titles.

Those accusations succeeded in court earlier this week, as a jury found a “preponderance of evidence” that the patents were infringed. The decision came following a one-week trial in which Activision Blizzard argued that its networking technology works differently from what is described in the patents, as reported by Reuters.

“While we are disappointed, we believe there is a strong basis for appeal,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said in a statement to the press. “We have never used the patented technologies at issue in our games.”

Acceleration Bay’s website describes it as an “incubator and investor” that wants to “nurture, protect, and support the dissemination of technological advancement.” But the company’s only currently listed venture is Edge Video, a “Web 3 Video Network” that provides crypto rewards and “AI-driven shopping” opportunities through interactive video overlays.

In a 2019 counterclaim stemming from a similar patent case (which was dismissed in 2020), Epic Games argued that “Acceleration engages in no business activity other than seeking to enforce the Asserted Patents.” Epic also said at the time that “Acceleration has asserted the same six patents against other major videogame publishers, even though Epic can see no applicability of the claimed technology to the videogame industry.”

Acceleration Bay has outstanding patent cases against Electronic Arts, Take-Two, and Amazon Web Services, among others.

In 2021, Activision Blizzard won a longstanding infringement suit brought by Worlds, Inc. over a patent for a “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.” In dismissing that case, US District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that “client-server networks, virtual worlds, avatars, or position and orientation information are not inventions of Worlds” and that its patented technology was not “inherently inventive or sufficient to ‘transform’ the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.”

Court rules against Activision Blizzard in $23.4M patent dispute Read More »

Microsoft shuts down Bethesda’s Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall studios

arkane, bethesda, gaming, hi-fi rush, microsoft, tango gameworks / Ryan Harris / May 7, 2024

Closing up shop —

Xbox maker wants to “prioritiz[e] high-impact titles” according to letter to staff.

Kyle Orland – May 7, 2024 3: 28 pm UTC

Artist's conception of Microsoft telling <em>Hi-Fi Rush</em> maker Tango Gameworks they no longer exist as a studio.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/hifirush-800×452.jpeg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=

Microsoft is shutting down four studios within its Bethesda Softworks subsidiary, according to a staff email obtained by IGN. The closures include Redfall developer Arkane Austin and Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks. While some team members will be reassigned to other parts of the company, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty said in a letter to staffers “that some of our colleagues will be leaving us.”

Tango Gameworks confirmed in a short social media message that “Hi-Fi Rush, along with Tango’s previous titles [like The Evil Within], will remain available and playable everywhere they are today.” But the closure of Arkane Austin means that “development will not continue on Redfall,” the company wrote in its own social media update. “Arkane Lyon will continue their focus on immersive experiences where they are hard at work on their upcoming project [Marvel’s Blade].”

In his note to staff, Booty said that [Redfall] “will remain online for players to enjoy and we will provide make-good offers to players who purchased the Hero DLC.”

Mobile-focused Alpha Dog Studios announced that its shutdown would lead to an August 7 closure of the servers for Mighty Doom. Players can request a refund for any in-game currency for that game, which will no longer be sold as of today. Roundhouse Studios, which formed in 2019 to help with development of Redfall, will be absorbed into Elder Scrolls Online studio Zenimax Online, according to Booty’s letter.

Doom studio id Software, Starfield studio Bethesda Game Studios, and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle studio Machine Games seem unaffected by today’s cuts.

A change in focus

Redfall was widely considered a failure inside and outside Microsoft.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/redfall-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Arkane Austin’s Redfall was widely considered a failure inside and outside Microsoft.

Arkane Austin

Arkane Austin’s sad fate is not too surprising given that Booty has publicly admitted that Redfall‘s troubled 2023 release was “a miss” for the company. The Tango Gameworks shutdown is more of a shock though, considering that Xbox Marketing VP Aaron Greenberg called Hi-Fi Rush “a breakout hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations” less than a year ago. “We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release,” he wrote at the time.

In his letter to staffers, Booty said the closures were “not a reflection of the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things.” And while the changes will be “disruptive,” Booty said that they are “grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.”

The consolidation will allow Microsoft to “invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP” and “create capacity to increase investment in other parts of our portfolio and focus on our priority games,” Booty continued.

“This is absolutely terrible,” Arkane Lyon Co-Creative Director Dinga Bakaba wrote in a scathing social media thread. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”

The Bethesda studio closures come just a few months after Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees in its 22,000 employee gaming division following the completion of its long-sought merger with Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft shuts down Bethesda’s Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall studios Read More »