Feature: Game Of The Decade Staff Picks – Pokémon GO
Following on from our reader-voted Top 50 Games of the Decade, Nintendo Life staff members will be picking their personal favourite Nintendo games between the years 2010-2019. Today, Ryan looks back at how a smartphone title took the world by storm and proved him completely wrong – in a good way…
Hold it, let me stop you right there. I know exactly what you’re thinking: “Pokémon GO can’t even hold a Litwick to something like Breath of the Wild, you absolute numpty”. Well, I completely agree with you (apart from that last bit, maybe) but love it or hate it, Niantic’s monster-catching mobile hit was – and remains – something very special.
As you’d probably expect from someone who writes about gaming for a living, I’ve spent pretty much my entire life up until this point spending unhealthy amounts of time playing ‘classic’ games. Whether it was the very best Mario platformers and Zelda epics, or the wonder of isolated Metroid adventures and pretty much every single Pokémon game under the sun, I’ve always been someone who prefers a traditional, single-player experience over anything else, ever since I was about six years old.
Coming from that background, the very idea of free-to-play games and their fun-restricting paywall setups have always grinded my gears. When Pokémon GO was first announced, I had absolutely no interest in playing it and even made a point to ignore it. “It’s the principle”, I would say, naively depriving myself of any enjoyment it might provide because my precious Pokémon shouldn’t be subjected to such treason.
But then Pokémania happened. When GO launched in 2016, it was everywhere – and I mean everywhere. Suddenly, everyone who would laugh at me for liking Pokémon at school was playing. Suddenly the entire world was playing. It was just like how I remember Pokémon as a kid, with talk of the franchise being everywhere you go, and I just couldn’t resist jumping in and downloading it for the first time. I’m glad I did.
The game actually gets that horrid free-to-play system completely right in my opinion – I still haven’t spent a penny despite clocking hundreds of hours in it – but as is the case with most mobile titles, the gameplay itself will never pull me in as much as a new single-player epic on Switch ever could. Instead, my reasoning for voting this as my Game of the Decade is down to the pure spectacle of its release and something much more personal.
Now, I’ll be brave here and share the fact that I’ve struggled with anxiety issues which centre around getting out and leaving the house, as well as an ever-present case of depression which has plagued my life for the last four or five years. I’m sure some of you reading this might have experienced similar, and will therefore know that a single little app could never eradicate such problems, but Pokémon GO has genuinely had a hugely positive impact on my health that I’ll be forever grateful for. I’m not alone, either.
I’ve been playing it on and off since – *checks app* – September 2016, and while I’ll sometimes ignore it for a few months at a time, it tends to serve as a form of relief when I’m at my worst. I vividly remember going through a period where my chest would tighten just from being five minutes or so from my home; GO somehow managed to distract me enough to beat that, with the idea of adding a rare Dratini to my collection being exciting enough to push past whatever was going on in my head. Similarly, on days where I’d usually wake up and be unable to get out of bed, here I was getting up nice and early to go on a walk. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.
Perhaps ‘a distraction’ is the perfect way to describe it. These days, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you tend to have your mobile on you and that means GO is only a loading screen away. Need an excuse to do some exercise? Go and play Pokémon GO. Need to have something to do while you’re standing waiting for transport? Organise your Pokémon in Pokémon GO. Feeling awkward in the presence of someone you’re not comfortable with? Whip out and talk about Pokémon GO – you know they’re playing it, too. Importantly, the gameplay itself is good enough to make you want to keep on top of it, so loading it up so often never feels like a chore.
Fans enjoying Pikachu Outbreak, a Pokémon GO event hosted in Yokohama, Japan in 2017…
Different people may, of course, find entirely different things to help with their motivation, but there’s one final part of this story that really is unique to Niantic’s world-dominating release and wraps things up nicely. We’re pretty used to the MMORPG format these days, or ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games’, where players from all over the world interact with each other and share the same gaming experience. With GO’s Raid Battles and Community Days, I’ve found myself chatting to complete strangers who share the same passion as me in a real-life setting, giving little knowing nods to each other as we walk around the same stretch of park for three hours trying to find a shiny Chikorita.
Never has a game so wonderfully connected a community on a global scale, and I never thought I’d see such a wide range of people, from toddlers to grandparents, all getting out and playing Pokémon together. From the perspective of someone who has adored Pokémon for 20 years, seeing masses of people roam around my local city, catching everything in sight, has been very strange but beautiful to behold. In the years to come, when we look back upon the key gaming moments of the 2010s, Pokémon GO will undoubtedly be right up there – and rightly so.
Ahead Of PS5 Launch, Sony Hires Former Microsoft Executive
In the lead-up to the PlayStation 5's release this year, Sony has announced a new executive hiring for the company's gaming division. The company has brought over Veronica Rogers from Microsoft as senior vice president, business operations for Sony Interactive Entertainment, which is the company that runs the PlayStation brand.
Rogers previously worked at Sony rival Microsoft for more than 13 years. Her most recent position at Microsoft was vice president sales and marketing, device partner sales, though it's unclear if she worked with the Xbox team within Microsoft. Before Microsoft, Rogers was a category sales lead at computing giant Dell.
In her new role, Rogers will "lead Sony Interactive Entertainment's go-to-market organization globally." A news release announcing the hiring also states that "Rogers will help drive business growth, lead strategic initiatives, and evolve the culture of SIE's Business Operations from its previously regionalized structure into a single global system." More specifically, Sony said Rogers will oversee the PlayStation brand's sales operations business across physical and digital, while she will also take the lead on PlayStation subscription offerings.
In a statement, Ryan said Rogers "brings a wealth of experience leading global sales organizations, managing strategic partnerships, developing innovative business models, and building world class teams.
Ryan added that Rogers will play a "crucial role" in Sony's ambitions to scale up the PlayStation business. The news release never mentions the PlayStation 5, but Rogers will undoubtedly play a significant role in the launch of the console later this year.
While the next-generation system has technically been announced, Sony has yet to share all the key launch info regarding specs, the title slate, and other key particulars. Jim Ryan recently said that the console's most intriguing features have yet to be announced.
Rogers is not the only high-profile gaming executive to move between Microsoft and Sony. Phil Harrison spent numerous years at Sony before moving to Microsoft, before moving again to Google to work on Stadia.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-11-2020, 03:24 PM - Forum: Windows
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Gears 5 featured in Evanescence new music video ‘The Chain’
Last fall, we celebrated early access for Gears 5 Ultimate Edition with the television debut of “The Chain” during the NFL Season Opener. Today, transcendent, two-time Grammy Award winning rock band, Evanescence, has released the full official music video “The Chain,” their first new rock recording in eight years. Directed by frequent collaborator, P.R. Brown (My Chemical Romance, John Mayer, Green Day), the piece blends powerful, epic performance visuals with footage from Gears 5. Watch it above, and listen to the song on all digital streaming platforms here.
Kait Diaz’s journey to discover herself in Gears 5 is brought to life by Evanescence’s haunting rendition of “The Chain,” one that evokes the feeling of standing together in solidarity against adverse and unknown forces, even those coming from within. The partnership with Gears 5 also begins a new journey in what is expected to be a very active period for the band as they get set to tour on the international stage.
On March 29, Evanescence’s spring tour dates commence with a performance at Download Festival in Tokyo, Japan. Shortly thereafter, the group will embark on a massive co-headline tour of Europe and the U.K. with Within Temptation that runs from April 4 to May 1. You can check out all of the band’s tour dates and purchase tickets at Evanescence’s website here, and fans can also keep up with what the band is working on by following them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Evanescence is currently working on new original music, which will start rolling out in 2020 in advance of their highly anticipated fifth full-length studio album.
If you haven’t experienced Gears 5’s five thrilling modes and deepest campaign ever, jump in on both Xbox One and Windows 10 PC with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. For the latest on Gears 5 and the Gears franchise, stay tuned to Xbox Wire and follow Gears on Twitter @gearsofwar.
It’s been well documented that searching for your next favourite game on the Nintendo Switch eShop is more hassle than it should be and as a result, we’ve seen plenty of developers slash the prices of their releases in a bid to land their title on the store’s ‘Deals’ and ‘Best Sellers’ tabs. Sometimes, they’ve even given games away for free.
In some ways, it’s great that you can load up your Switch and grab so many games for such a little amount, but we’d argue that things are getting a little out of control. We’ve just had a quick browse of the eShop ourselves in the hopes of finding some quirky, fun games for cheap, and discovered that a whopping 64 titles are currently being offered for less than a single dollar in the US. It’s a similar story in Europe, too – visiting the UK’s eShop reveals 49 games available for less than £1.
A small handful of these appear to be titles that are permanently priced that low; Soccer Pinball, for example, has always been priced at $0.99 which is fair enough. The majority of the list, however, are games which are on sale with prices reduced by as much as 90%. That isn’t an extreme, either – plenty of the games listed are 90% off.
If you’ve landed here hoping to find a bargain and want to see the cheap list of games for yourself, you can do so by heading to the ‘Search’ tab of the eShop (top-left), clicking ‘Price Range’, clicking ‘View More’ on the ‘$0.01 – $9.99’ (or equivalent) section, and then changing the filter at the top-right to ‘Price (low to high)’. Even that was unnecessarily complicated, wasn’t it?
It leaves us with an interesting topic for debate: should we be celebrating the fact that, as gamers, we have access to plenty of games for relatively low prices, or does this just further highlight the discoverability issues faced by both developers and players as a result of the eShop’s design and the sheer volume of games releasing each and every week? We’ll let you mull that one over in the comments.
Fortnite Food Truck Locations Guide: Where To Visit Food Trucks
Fortnite's Winterfest event is now over, but a new set of challenges has gone live in the battle royale game. This batch is called Remedy vs. Toxin, although there isn't much of a theme running through the challenges, so you'll be doing various tasks like getting SMG eliminations and earning Survivor medals.
While many of the Remedy vs. Toxin challenges are fairly straightforward, one that may give you some trouble asks you to visit three different food trucks. If you don't know where those are located, this guide will show you where to go.
Where Are The Food Truck Locations?
Food trucks aren't nearly as common in Fortnite as they were on the game's old map. That said, we've found four of them spread out around the island, and you only need to visit three to complete this challenge. We've marked all the food truck locations on the map below.
How To Complete The Challenge
You don't need to do anything special to complete this challenge; simply make your way to three of the food trucks listed above and you'll be finished. You need to visit three different trucks, so you can't simply return to the same one in different matches, but other than that, this challenge shouldn't pose too much of a problem. Once you've visited three, you'll earn 52,000 XP for your troubles and unlock another Remedy vs. Toxin challenge to complete.
There are still a few weeks left in Season 1 of Fortnite Chapter 2, so there's still time to complete any challenges you may have missed from earlier weeks. If you need help with those, we've collated all of our maps and guides in our full Fortnite Chapter 2 challenges roundup.
ArmorPaint is an open source competitor to Substance Painter, from the creator of the Armory game engine (tutorial series available here). It is available for just 16 Euro in binary form, but can also be built from source code. This guide walks you step by step through the process of building ArmorPaint from source.
There are a few requirements before you can build. Download and install the following programs if not already installed:
First step, we clone the repository. Make sure to add the –recursive flag(that’s two ‘-‘ by the way).
Open a command prompt, cd to the directory where you want to install ArmorPaint’s source code and run the command:
Depending on your internet speed this could take a minute to several minutes while all of the files are downloaded.
In Explorer, go the installation directory, then navigate to armorpaint\Kromx\V8\Libraries\win32\release and using 7zip extract v8_monolith.7z to the same directory as the .7z file.
Next in the command prompt run the following commands
(Assuming you are reusing the same CMD that you did the git clone from)
cd armorpaint
node Kromx/make –g direct3d11
cd Kromx
node Kinc/make –g direct3d11
explorer .
If you receive any errors above, the most likely cause is node not being installed. The final command will now open a Windows Explorer window in the Kromx subdirectory. Open the build directory and load the file Krom.sln.
This will open the project in Visual Studio. If you haven’t run VS yet,you may have to do some initial installation steps. Worst case scenario run through the initial install, close and double click Krom.sln again.
First make sure that you are building for x64 and Release mode at the top:
In the Solution Explorer, select Krom then hit ALT + ENTER or right click and select Properties.
Then select Debugging, in Command Arguments enter ..\..\build.krom then click Apply.
You are now ready to build ArmorPaint. Select Ctrl + SHIFT + B or select Build->Build Solution.
Assuming no errors, are exe should be built. Now go to the folder armorpaint\Kromx\build\x64\Release and copy the file Krom.exe, then copy to armorpaint\build\krom. You can now run Krom.exe and you’re good to go.
Step by step instructions are available in the video below.
I don’t know if you could tell but I’ve been doing a lot of random things this week. Early Jan is usually a slow time so might as well experiment to fill the void. Been doing a bit more news as interesting stories have cropped up, and also been refreshing our Apple Arcade coverage to try and get a read on where to take that.
Black Desert Mobile seems to be doing very well for itself at the moment, so we’re going to be updating and maintaining our guide on it for the moment. It’s genuinely a beautiful game, even on mobile, and if you enjoy MMORPGs then you should definitely check it out. Don’t let the free-to-play trappings put you off – there’s barely anything gated behind paywalls, but it is very grindy.
Immortal Rogue released around 11 months ago and was one of the highlights of mobile rogue-likes in 2019. Developer Kyle Barrett has returned this week with another creation. This one swaps an immortal vampire-thing with a star fighter. It’s a shooter designed for one-touch player, and has rogue-like elements as well as lots and lots of space monsters. We haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but we’ll add it to the review pile. Here’s some gameplay to tide you over in the meantime:
App News & Updates
Speaking of Black Desert Mobile, they’ve added yet more content to the game this week with a new PvP Guild War mode. Here’s an official summary:
Guild War is a PvP mode specifically made for guilds, where Adventurers can engage in battle against enemy guild members in the open world of Black Desert Mobile. Guild masters and officers can declare war by entering the enemy guild’s name in the guild window. At least 10 guild members are required to attend within 48 hours along with a payment of 3 million silver from their guild fund.
While we’re on the subject of MMORPGs, it seems there’s an official Final Fantasy XIV spin-off game in the works for mobile in this genre. It will be set in a parallel universe to the main FF15 game that was released in 2016. It’s being developed by developers JSC and GAEA in conjunction with Square. Enduins has more details.
If I were to ask you what you thought the most talked about game on Twitter was in 2019, what would be your answer? It’s not what I thought it would be, but it was in the same ballpark – Fate/Grand Order is the winner, with Fortnite coming in second. PocketGamer.biz has the full top-ten list if you want to check it out.
Last and certainly not least, our good friends over at Tiny Touch Tales are working on a new game due out on January 15th on both iOS and Android. From Mr. Rauers himself:
Maze Machina combines a simple turn-based swipe to move mechanic with a tile based item system that allows for endless combinations of tactical attack, defense and utility moves on a small 4×4 grid. Short game sessions allow for quick bursts of tense gameplay which you can hop in and out of at any point. In various modes and high score challenges you can measure your skill against other players.
We’ve missed having a new TTT game to play around with. Michael’s already lined up to do the review, but because he’s also away on holiday we might not have it ready for launch day. Will be done ASAP, though. Here’s a trailer:
Best App Sales
There’s honestly nothing worth shouting about this week as far as I can see, although feel free to suggest anything you’ve seen you think readers should know about.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-11-2020, 09:00 AM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
Expanding our vision for retail with Dynamics 365 at NRF 2020
Retailers experienced more change in the last decade than nearly any other industry, a trend that is not likely to slow as we enter 2020. The only certainty in the new decade is the need for technologies that help retailers stay nimble, relevant, and anticipate customer needs and shopping preferences.
As my colleague Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, shared in a blog post today, consumers are driving the future of retail—from when, where, and how they engage with a retail brand to demands for higher standards in data privacy and secure shopping. Technology will usher in a new era of intelligent retail experiences across every storefront, physical and digital.
Next week, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show, Microsoft will demonstrate Dynamics 365 solutions as part of the breadth of our company’s offerings, that will power retail innovation in the next decade. These applications unify customer experiences across every commerce channel from physical to online stores and pop up shops to subscription services as well as unlock AI-powered insights from the back office to the frontline to deliver exceptional, personalized customer experiences.
This vision for the future of retail is spotlighted by new features and product releases announced today:
Dynamics 365 Commerce, generally available on February 3rd is a modern omnichannel commerce solution that unifies back office, e-commerce, in-store, and call center and simplifies the integration of new emerging channels.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, featuring two new capabilities to reduce fraud and related costs while improving the buying experience: loss prevention and account protection, available for preview on March 2nd.
Dynamics 365 Connected Store is an application that combines AI-driven insights and IoT-connected sensors and cameras to empower retailers with real-time observational data to improve in-store performance, coming to preview later this calendar year.
Deliver insightful shopping experiences
Omnichannel retailing is now the standard for success in the market. For too many retailers, however, the slow adoption of technology to support the model has hampered progress toward truly unified cross-channel shopping experiences that bridge physical and online channels.
At NRF, Microsoft will demonstrate a modern, flexible cloud commerce solution that powers rich, customer-first experiences at all touchpoints. Dynamics 365 Commerce, slated for general availability on February 3rd, is an evolution of our Dynamics 365 Retail offering and delivers a comprehensive omnichannel solution to unify back-office, e-commerce, in-store, and call center experiences.
Spotlighted features for the February 3rd launch include:
Native e-commerce capabilities, featuring built-in web authoring and development tools to create engaging, intelligent digital storefronts, plus a connected marketing and commerce platform for seamless management of content, assets, promotions, inventory, and pricing across channels.
Native integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.
AI-moderated ratings and reviews and intelligent customer recommendations for more personalized customer experiences.
Dynamics 365 Commerce customers are finding new ways to build brand loyalty, optimize operations and supply-chain efficiencies, and deliver better business outcomes. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the third-largest premium wine company in the United States, leverages Dynamics 365 Commerce to provide a seamless customer experience across all three direct-to-consumer channels, e-commerce, brick and mortar, and clubs, and across the different brands in the Ste. Michelle Wine Estates portfolio. With a full end-to-end retail solution, Ste. Michelle can put the customer at the center of the buying journey and provide more personalized and timely customer recommendations and experiences from the tasting room to digital touchpoints.
“From the moment a consumer visits one of our wineries or tasting rooms, joins one of our clubs, or decides to purchase products online, we want to remove all sources of friction that come between the consumer and the perfect wine choice.” – Francis Perrin, Chief Marketing Officer for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates
Even for global e-commerce leaders, it’s not always easy to safeguard millions of transactions and deliver the best possible shopping and purchasing experiences at the same time. The accelerating shift toward omnichannel has increased the threat of fraud-related losses. And greater exposure to theft or improper discounting can introduce more pressure on the already thin margins in brick and mortar stores. In fact, fraudulent transactions globally account for over $175 billion in fraud-related costs every year.
In 2019, Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to help reduce fraud and its related costs, increase revenue, and deliver better buying experiences with lower friction and more support.
Today we’re announcing two new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection—both available for preview on March 2nd—to help prevent loss and mitigate risks for merchants, leveraging the power of big data and ethical AI to provide a best-in-class fraud solution for omnichannel merchants:
Account protection helps retailers recognize patterns related to fraudulent e-commerce activities during account creation or attempted hijacking. Account protection uses artificial intelligence to aid in decreasing the costs of account fraud by helping to reduce the number of fraudulent accounts, in turn protecting the businesses’ reputation and improving customer experiences and satisfaction.
Account protection can help retailers improve the bottom line by reducing fraud activities and friction throughout the customer journey, improve business reputation by preventing negative exposure due to fraudulent activity, and increase customer satisfaction by protecting customer authenticity and privacy.
Loss prevention helps reduce fraud in brick and mortar stores and boost revenues at the retailer by providing insights around returns and discount fraud. By using data from commerce systems and the power of AI, loss prevention helps merchants decipher patterns of losses from returns, improper discounts, merchandise mishandling, and inventory turn-over.
Loss prevention helps provide anomaly reporting and actionable insights that allow retailers to gain visibility into specific business functions which may require additional controls. In addition, loss prevention can help reduce the manual effort needed to determine the business entities and functions which are at risk.
BESTSELLER, the international clothing and accessories company, is leveraging Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to reduce fraud-related losses across its 70 markets spanning most of Europe, the Middle East, Canada, India and globally via e-commerce. BESTSELLER uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to spot patterns of activity that suggest fraud and work to remedy the situation within its stores. After a successful pilot deployment, BESTSELLER is rolling out Fraud Protection across its stores in Europe, and eventually the world. The company projects that it will save millions of dollars as a result, while also boosting BESTSELLER’s core value of trust.
“By identifying fraud and loss quickly with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, we’re boosting business outcomes and building a culture where our core value of honesty is practiced by everyone every day.” – Kim Guldager, Senior Program Manager at BESTSELLER.
With real-time observational data about customer movement or the status of products and store devices, there’s tremendous opportunity to gain a better understanding of the retail space and improve in-store performance. Microsoft is dedicated to helping retailers adapt and optimize physical retail spaces to meet new levels of customer expectation.
Available in preview later this year, Dynamics 365 Connected Store helps retailers both understand how customers use the retail space over time, as well as monitor real-time activities from checkout line queues to shelf voids to help frontline workers deliver exceptional customer service.
Connected Store can optimize the shopping experience in real time through triggered alerts based on real-time data from video cameras and IoT sensors and also provides longer term insight that can illuminate patterns and opportunities that lie within the day-to-day occurrences of a retail space.
Marks & Spencer, for instance, is using Dynamics 365 Connected Store to capture observational data from customer behavior across multiple stores worldwide, and over a period of time, to identify patterns and trends. This unlocks the opportunity to predict inventory needs and replenish stock levels in real time, all to create first class experiences for the customer.
See what’s in store for retail and technology
Microsoft, along with our global partner ecosystem, is dedicated to enabling intelligent retail by empowering the industry with the tools to unlock the full potential of customers, employees, and data. Together with the solutions highlighted above, NRF attendees can see demonstrations of our portfolio of business applications which will include Supply Chain Management, Customer Insights, and Power BI dashboards for frontline workers to the back office. We’ll also be showing our new mixed reality solution, Product Visualize, that lets sales representatives place a 3D digital twin of a product in their customer’s environment.
Get the full story
For those attending NRF, stop by the Microsoft booth for immersive demonstrations of our full range of retail solutions, attend deep dive sessions, network with us at the FQ Lounge, and more. View the agenda for all the ways to engage with us at NRF.
We also invite you to view our latest research, the Retail Trends Playbook 2020 for more insights into emerging trends that will help empower retailers to create exceptional, insightful shopping experiences for customers.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-11-2020, 08:59 AM - Forum: Minecraft
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Minecraft Forum – Plans for 2020
Greetings!
The last year was an interesting one for MinecraftForum. With the planned archiving of the forum and then the change of ownership to keep the forum active, there has been a lot of back-end work to keep this site going. While we’ve definitely been struggling to keep up in some areas (poor news…), we’ve certainly not been twiddling our thumbs behind the scenes.
With that in mind, we figured it’s probably a good time to just let you know of some of the plans that we hope to get to in the year 2020. Some of these would be more hidden changes, some small, but some giant. Let’s go through what we have in our minds for this year.
1) Restructure of our forum sections as a whole
This one is a giant goal of ours. We know that the current structure is…. not exactly great for a lot of different reasons. When we made the current structure we tried to keep the naming similar to what Mojang calls their versions of the game, but we knew when we did it that it would be confusing. We’re re-evaluating this and are looking at better ways to collapse or expand sections in order to make the most of what we have from you, the community, and to get your content shared with millions of users. We’ll have posts later in our Forum Discussion and Information section once we have a better plan for how we’d like to restructure things. We know this won’t be an easy change, but we will value your input into this process as we go, to point out things we may not notice or think of. Keep an eye out for more information regarding this.
2) New server list
In continuing the forum restructure, we’ve had a thread that’s been trying to gather ideas for a new server list. If you didn’t know, Minecraft Forum used to run a server list, which tried to help promote servers in a different light. Sadly, this list wasn’t maintained well, and so it was discontinued. We are looking at the idea of bringing a list back, knowing that it has to cater to small servers, large servers, whitelist servers, graylist servers, realms, even just the occasional “i want a friend” servers. And not just for Java Edition, we know there’s more to the multiplayer world. We don’t know if this will happen in 2020 due to the amount of effort it would take, but it’s a goal we have.
3) Alternate logins
We know that only having a Twitch login is a huge turn-off for some people. We are looking into additional providers to support in the future. We’re hoping to offer Xbox Live and Google as alternative providers, perhaps some others too, however there is no ETA on this yet. We are still doing research and work to determine how difficult it will be to support multiple providers like this within our existing system.
4) Better filters for content searching
The server search functionality is a feature that we know is… not great. Not only that, the prefix system that we have is not obvious to users that you can actually use it to find content. We are looking into better ways of making this more apparent, and to make it more of an actual search feature. It’d be a lot nicer to find those 1.15 fantasy packs if we had a simple filter, wouldn’t it?
5) More news
News is one of the most important things that makes it to the front page here. And while we’ve done our best to keep up with the essential updates, we know we’ve been really slacking to keep you all up to date on all that’s going on in the world of Minecraft. We are looking at ways to better put news in front of you that you would care about, and not just repeat what Mojang already gives you. After all, there’s more to the community than just the latest build update.
6) More bug fixes
2019 was full of back-end fixes that you may not have seen. Although, being able to see your old PMs was definitely a fix I know some of you have noticed. We know there’s still a lot of issues with the site, and will be continuing to work on improving your experience so that you can find and share your content.
That about covers it for this update! We will continue to strive to keep this forum going far into the future with Magic Find, whose administrative & dev teams have been directly working with us to make the site work even better than before. Let us know of any other things you’d like to see, and who knows, maybe your ideas might be done.
The game has you taking on the role of Stella, a game developer who works at the ‘Awesome Rainbow Corp’. Stella’s tasked with removing bugs from the studio’s big game on the eve of its release – no pressure, then – and as she scrambles around to fix all of the issues, she stumbles across some very mysterious errors indeed.
To combat this, she whips up a debug program – the Code Shifter – which allows her digital avatar ‘Sera’ to rather literally fight the bugs from within. As you can see from the trailer and screenshots on this very page, you’ll be presented with two very different aesthetic styles as you cross from Stella’s real world to Sera’s in-game world. Here are some key features:
– Iconic Arc System Works characters remixed in 8-bit pixel art, including Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, the River City series and more! – Utilize a whopping 100 characters to successfully overcome deadly obstacles and enemies to ship the game in time! – The soundtrack features 8-bit renditions of popular character themes like “Give Me a Break” (Sol Badguy’s Theme), Bullet Dance (Noel Vermillion’s Theme) and more! – By defeating the bosses of each stage Sera is rewarded with new costumes that gives her different powers when equipped. – The “COLORFUL FIGHTERS” game mode is a brawler mini-game that allows up to 4 players to duke it out in a free-for-all! – Fight against other CPU controlled characters in the Ex Stages of the main story to unlock more playable characters!
The game is set to launch on Switch and other platforms in Q1 of 2020, so it shouldn’t be too long before we hear a little more about this one.
Do you like what you see? Do you think this might be something to add to your Switch wishlist? Let us know in the comments.
