Category Archive

Technology

Broken Bootlegs- King of Fighters Genesis/MD

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Erika

King of Fighters 99
Broken Bootlegs is a weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s entry brings one of the more well-known fighting game series to the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive: King of Fighters! While on a neverending quest to find fighting games to play some years back, I eventually started exploring outside of the realm of Capcom and rediscovered SNK since I played Samurai Showdown IV back when it was new. From Art of Fighting, to Fatal Fury, to King of Fighters, I fell in love with the older KOF games, with ’98 being

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Nacon’s New E-Sports Focused Controller Aims To Bring Precision To Players

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Competitive E-Sports are dominated by the use of the classic Keyboard and Mouse even at the highest levels of play. Naccon hopes to change this with their PC-centric, E-sports focused Nacon GC-400ES controller. A crowd funding campaign to make this peripheral a reality, a crowdfunding campaign will be launched on Indiegogo on Monday morning. What will set the Naccon GC-400ES Alpha Pad aside from other top tier hardware like the Razer Sabretooth or the Xbox One Elite?  The Alpha Pad includes two different modes that can be selected before use – the industry standard “X-Input” method used by the Xbox

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Oculus Driver V1.4 Breaks Popular Cross Platform Game Solution ‘RIVIVE’

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

A new update to the Oculus Home platform, driver version 1.4, breaks the community created cross-platform enabling RIVIVE modification. RIVIVE allowed owners of the HTC Vive to play Oculus home exclusive titles like EVE: Valkyrie and  Lucky’s Tale without owning an Oculus device. It appears, according to CrossVR’s research as posted to Reddit, that the latest Oculus Home Update adds a new DRM check that checks whether or not the users Oculus headset is connected to their online platform. While RIVIVE is able to spoof the presence of a headset locally, it does not communicate with Oculus’ servers meaning there

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BloodBowl 2 Mac Version Released

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Blood Bowl 2, the hyper violent football fantasy game based upon Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe is now available on OSX thanks to Cyanide Studios. BloodBowl 2 combines the familiar fantasy aesthetic that players have known for decades now from the Warhammer property and combines it with the ruleset from American Football. Add in a good dose of over the top violence, a turn based rule set similar to the original board game adaptation, a new graphics engine plus commentary and it is easy to see why Blood Bowl 2 was necessary. Owners of the Windows PC version of Blood Bowl

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Internal SEGA USA “Trainumentary” Is The Most 90s Thing Ever

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The 1990s were a magical time when Jolt Cola was still readily available, Bill Clinton was President, SEGA & Sonic the Hedgehog rivaled Nintendo & Mario in popularity and you could totally get away with wearing a beanie to work!  Prepare yourselves for possibly one of the most 90s videos you’ve ever seen courtesy of the 1996 SEGA USA Testing Department – “The SEGA TEST”. Early ‘96 was an odd time for the folks at SEGA USA – SEGA was coming off a particular strong ’94 where they had outsold the SNES in North America, the begging of ’96 was

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The Many Boothes, Game Stations & Custom Stuff From PAX East

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The Penny Arcade Expo floor is absolutely massive and it’d almost be impossible for one person to see every game, exhibit and custom piece of kit being shown off. Over the course of the last three days I’ve checked out everything from hardware manufacturers, to Square Enix’s latest offerings to the Indie Mega Booth in search of some of the coolest stuff to be found on the show floor. Fionna shot an excellent 7 minute floor walkthrough video that gives you a small taste of the PAX East experience. [youtube id=”VqAjUZDMSVQ”]

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Lucid Sound wants to reinvent gaming heaphones

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Fionna Schweit

How many times have you been out while wearing your gaming headphones and thought “I bet I look pretty un-professional”? If you answered yes to this question Lucid Sound has the answer. Found by a series of alumni from Triton and Mad Catz these folks are no strangers to video game peripherals.  We got a chance to talk to Alex Verrey about the brand new product and I was quite impressed. For the audiophiles of you out there here are the technical specs of the headset: Speaker Size: 50mm Sound Space: Amplified Stereo Sound Power Output: 70mW 32ohm per channel Frequency Response: 20 – 20,000 Hz

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With Commercial Release The Oculus DK1 Has Become a PaperWeight

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

I knew this day would come eventually but I didn’t think it would be this soon. With the release of Oculus Home and the Oculus runtime V 1.30 the original Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (or DK1) has been left behind in favor of its more robust successors – the DK2 and the recently released consumer version, the CV1. As I packed up my trusty VR headset today in its elegant black case because these latest drivers have made it an unusable paperweight. 

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Surprise, The Internet Loves Miitomo – Combining Miis & Cats Is The Best Thing Ever!

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The internet loves adorable kitty cats and memes, right? Well, we can add Nintendo’s first mobile title Miitomo to that list as well, for the time being. The company’s first mobile offering is currently trending in top 10 on Twitter with over 135K tweets about the game. Sadly over on Facebook the story isn’t exactly the same, as of publication time Miitomo is not trending. However, for those who doubted Nintendo’s presence carrying over into the mobile space, this just shows that there is an appetite for Nintendo content on smartphones. The dream #miitomo pic.twitter.com/fGuxw3K2rM — Sunny Jo (@joooocat) April

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Independent Games Festival Awards Recap

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Last week while our staff were busy crossing the many halls of the Games Developer Conference 2016 the IGF (Independent Games Festival) were just as busy preparing to announce the winners for this year’s awards. The grand prize went to Seumas McNally’s narrative crime title Her Story won not only the Grand Prize but also the Best In Narrative award as well. Indie darling Undertale took mercy on it’s playerbase and won the Audience Award while minimalist transit simulator Mini Metro is heading home with the Excellence in Audio award.

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It doesn’t matter if the NX is a failure Nintendo will go on

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Fionna Schweit

Guest post by SZKO Have you ever heard of the term “Golden Parchute”? Well if not, a Golden Parachute is basically a contract between a C-level executive and a company that says if the executive screws up in running the company and gets fired then they will be paid out some arbitrarily high amount of money. This allows the executive to make bold decisions that hopefully will steer the company into making giant piles of money that the executive may not otherwise make because they are playing it safe. Having a giant pile of cash to fall back and to

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Clickteam Fusion 3 Hopes To Revolution Indie Game Development [World Premiere]

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Games have been my passion since I was very young and along with this passion came the spark of creativity – hoping that someday I would be able to develop my own video games. A piece of software from then little-known French software creation firm Clickteam called The Games Factory helped me explore the core concepts of game design. 16 years later, Clickteam is still around and their most current piece of engine technology, Clickteam Fusion 2.5 powers some of the most popular indie titles such as Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Escapists. The next generation of Clickteam developers

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GDC 16: Partying With Destructoid & Homefront The Revolution

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Homefront The Revolution
Tonight in San Francisco longtime gaming website Destructoid celebrated their 10th anniversary with a downtown bash for both GDC attendees and the public. They also partnered with Deep Silver and Dambuster Studios to help promote the upcoming Homefront The Revolution. I got the chance to attend this pretty sweet party, here are my impressions. The line to get into the party was absolutely massive, fans & conference attendees alike lined up around the block for their chance at getting into the celebration. Surprisingly things moved at a rather brisk pace and despite the line’s size I was into the event in

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Square Enix Unveils GDC 2016 Panel Line-Up

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Square Enix
Square Enix announced their line-up of talks for the 2016 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco California. In total Square has 9 presentations set across the first four days of the conference. Topics range from the use of interactive story mechanics to handle tough issues like suicide, mental illness and loss in Life Is Strange, to the process of optimization that Just Cause 3 developer Avalanche Studios used in conjunction with Iris graphics to make the world of JC3 explode with such fidelity. In terms of franchises, this year’s session line-up from Square focuses on games that have already been released like the two

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Game Developers Choice Awards & IGDFA Open Up Audience Voting

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

This year at the 30th Game Developers Conference the Game Developer’s Choice Awards & Independent Games Festival Awards will announce this years slate of winners on Wednesday March 16 in San Francisco, California.  Now both organizations are asking their audience for their say – with the Audience’s Choice awards. Here are the finalist for the Game Developers Choice Awards Audience Award: Alpha Bear Ark: Survival Evolved Bloodbourne Crypt of the Necrodancer Downwell Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Fallout 4 Fallout Shelter Her Story Just Cause 3 Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Lara Croft: Go Life is Strange Metal Gear Solid

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