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It’s been announced that the TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine module (or the EM04 “Turbo” Element Module Set to give its full title) for the upcoming modular retro console Polymega will include five licensed pack-in games playable from the module itself.

The five bonus titles are Moto Roader (NA and JP versions), Moto Roader II (JP version), Double Dungeons (NA and JP versions), Shockman (NA and JP versions) and Dragon Egg (JP version).

The console is looking to be a very convenient and faithful solution for all your retro gaming needs – it’s even going to feature a Retro Gun Controller accessory that will let you play light gun games on a modern HD TV set. Check out our hands-on feature courtesy of Jeremy Parish (who’s apparently partial to the odd retro game).

The only obvious fly in the ointment at the moment appears to be the price – $299.99 for the base unit plus $59.99 per module. These pack-in games do sweeten the deal, but the cost is up there with current gen consoles.

It seems that Turbografx and PC Engine fans have plenty to look forward to at the moment – the announcement of the Turbografx-16 and PC Engine Mini consoles means there’s suddenly multiple ways to play that system’s catalogue on a modern telly. Check out our Turbografx-16 and PC Engine Mini pre-order guide for more info on the mini console.

Do these pack-in games make the Polymega a more attractive offering to you? Do you like the look of Playmaji’s modular retro solution? Let us know with a comment below.

Nintendo has applied for and been granted the trademark for ‘Nintendo Switch Do’, according to an official document that has surfaced in Israel. Dutch website Let’s Go Digital caught wind of the filing at the Israel Patent Office and has set minds racing as to what it could refer to.

As you can see yourself by examining the document itself (courtesy of Let’s Go Digital), trade mark number 318447 was applied for on 8th July 2019 and granted on 16th July. The goods and services it relates to, however, are extremely wide-ranging and non-specific. Here’s a small taster of the things it apparently covers:

Class: 9
Electronic game programs; Downloadable electronic game programs; Video game programs; Downloadable video game programs; Video game cartridges; Programs for consumer video game apparatus; Downloadable programs for consumer video game apparatus; Electronic storage media recorded with programs for consumer video game apparatus; Programs for handheld electronic game apparatus; Downloadable programs for handheld electronic game apparatus…

It goes on:

Class 28:
Games; Toys; Portable games with liquid crystal displays; Protective films adapted for screens for portable games; Protective carrying cases specially adapted for handheld video games; Handheld electronic games; Video game machines; Controllers for game consoles; Joysticks for video games; Apparatus for games; Arcade video game machines…

It continues, but you get the idea. So what has Nintendo actually trademarked here, besides absolutely everything under the sun with a possible connection to games, video-based or otherwise? Well, it’s tough to say given that deluge of potential applications, but Nintendo has recently opened its second retail store in Tel Aviv, so the filing of the trademark in Israel suggests it could be related to that.

Whether it’s a service, an initiative related with the Tel Aviv store or something entirely different, the mysterious ‘Nintendo Switch Do’ is sure to get tongues wagging. Could it be connected to the long-rumoured Switch ‘Pro’? Well, yes, but for all we know it could just as easily be a capacitive stylus. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more information.

What do you think Nintendo Switch Do could be? A new service for Switch Lite? A Nintendo Switch Online feature? Let us know your ideas below.

By Roger Fingas
Wednesday, July 17, 2019, 08:20 pm PT (11:20 pm ET)

A showcase title for the Apple TV, thatgamecompany’s “Sky: Children of the Light” — also available for iPhones and iPads — is now finally in wide release, including the U.S.

Players become one of the game’s namesake children, exploring seven realms as they work to solve puzzles and return fallen stars to their constellations. Later expansions will include new realms and seasonal events.

The title is highly focused on its social aspects, the idea being that people will run into each other in the world and team up for exploration, saving spirits, and finding treasure. Players can customize their characters, gift each other candles, and even create music.

The game is free to play, but does offer a range of in-app purchases ranging from $0.99 to $49.99, such as bundles and season passes.

“Sky” first premiered during Apple’s September 2017 press event, when it was used to demonstrate the power of the Apple TV 4K. It arrived in the Philippines in December that year as “Sky: Light Awaits,” but then saw its rollout slow to a crawl. In June 2019, thatgamecompany announced July 11 as a global launch date —a last-minute delay pushed the timing to July 18. The app is out in the U.S. despite it being the 17th as of this writing.

iPhone and iPad owners must be running iOS 9 or later. Apple TV users must have a device with tvOS.

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Ubisoft has once again partnered with HitRecord to solicit assets for an upcoming game and, as with last time around, the arrangement is drawing criticism from the game development community.

The two companies are working together to crowdsource music for Ubisoft’s upcoming game Watch Dogs Legion, a partnership Ubisoft says in a statement intends to give artists “a chance to have their own creative expressions included in the game.”

Many in the game development community, however, say that Ubisoft and HitRecord are soliciting spec work, or calling for artists to create and submit their work for free with only the hope they’ll be paid for their time and effort in the long run.

That is the core of how the HitRecord platform works: companies publish a description of the work they’re after and call for artists to submit bits and pieces of content along those lines. Those that have their submissions selected for inclusion in the final work get paid for their contributions, while the artists that created assets that weren’t selected are left without compensation.

For example, right now Legion’s HitRecord page has five songs listed in the “concepting” stage. The “Dark Electronic Heist Song” is looking for artists to submit vocals, music, and writing while the “Battle Anthem Metal Song” is seeking writing, music, voice acting, and vocals. Artists then submit the individual parts being requested, and the final song will ultimately be a combination of several of those submissions.

Ubisoft has used HitRecord to crowdsource art assets for the yet-unreleased Beyond Good and Evil 2 in the past, and encountered the same public outcry. Last time around, the platform’s founder, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, released a blog post defending his platform and saying that the partnership wasn’t the same as spec work.

It hasn’t come to that point yet this time, but Ubisoft itself has already released its own statement defending the partnership on the grounds that submissions are voluntary and meant to give the HitRecord community and Watch Dogs fans a chance to land music in the game.

The statement also notes that the studio is working with “professional artists and composers” on licensed songs and an original score to be featured in the game, so the submissions being called for through HitRecord are only for additional content beyond the game’s existing soundtrack.

Ubisoft directs those curious about the arrangement to an FAQ page that reiterates that the company will pay its HitRecord contributors if their submission is selected for use in the final game. It has set aside $2,000 for each of the 10 songs it plans to use HitRecord to create, a sum that will be divided among the artists whose work is picked up for each song. Specifically: “the individual contributions that make up that final song will receive a percentage of the $2,000 based off the impact that individual contribution has on the final piece.”

“If a contribution you have uploaded to HitRecord is included in a final asset that HitRecord delivers to the Watch Dogs Legion Dev Team, then you will get paid for your contribution!” reads an earlier part of the FAQ.

“HitRecord is a collaborative creative space and we use the site, the projects, and the challenges to both develop ideas and produce finished assets,” reads the next answer. “And, as with every creative endeavor, some ideas won’t develop or work out as we expected, and some pieces won’t be the right fit for the game.”

Wednesday March 10, 1998. It’s 7:45 A.M., and I’m nervously sipping coffee in one corner of a cavernous television studio belonging to pro football megabroadcaster and Super Bowl-winning coach John Madden. I’ve been up since 5:30, I’m freezing my butt off, and the Ultimatte guy has called to say there’s fog on I-680 and he’s going to be late.

The reason I’m up at this godawful hour — my normal workday runs from about 10 AM to 7 or 8 (or 9 or 10) in the evening — is that I’m the audio/video producer for Electronic Arts’ hit game, Madden NFL Football for the Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64 and PC. I’m the guy who puts Madden into Madden, and today is the first of the only two days a year that we actually get to film the Great Man himself. The reason I’m nervous is that I’m just about to spend around $100,000 in sixteen hours flat. These are the two most expensive days in the production year, and if I screw up – and if the Ultimatte guy doesn’t show, that will qualify – I probably won’t get a second chance. Somebody will eventually do it again, at great cost and inconvenience, but it won’t be me. I’ll be history.

Madden NFL Football is EA’s flagship sports product and its longest-running franchise. The original John Madden Football was first written in back in 1989 for the Apple II, if you can believe that. I wasn’t at EA then. I joined the company in 1992, hired as a software engineer to write their next PC baseball game, the successor to Earl Weaver Baseball. Not long after I got there EA discovered they could make ten times as much money developing Genesis and Super Nintendo titles, and they dropped PC baseball with little ceremony. My producer, the legendary Scott Orr, liked some comments I had written about the design script I was working from, and he asked if I wanted to quit programming and be a lead designer in his new production group. Although sports was not my favorite genre, the opportunity to be a game designer for Electronic Arts – in any capacity – was too good to pass up. In 1993 the company began to support the short-lived 3DO Multiplayer in a big way, and of course Madden had to be on it. It was EA’s first-ever sports game for a CD-ROM platform, and I got to design it.

Five years and five Maddens later, I’m watching as taciturn, muscular young men and women begin to move around the vast sound stage, warming up video gear and lighting. I don’t know their names; I hired a production company, and it supplied them. I’m in charge of this shoot, but most of the time it runs itself. This is a good thing, because I don’t have any formal training to be an A/V producer. The 3DO machine was the first device EA had ever supported that was capable of playing video (after a fashion), so the company insisted that Madden 3DO include a lot of it. As the designer, it fell to me to decide what to create, then script it, shoot it, and edit it. Suddenly, and without meaning to, I became my group’s video guru. Subsequent editions of Madden for the new generation of consoles didn’t really need a full-time designer, but they did need A/V production and I was elected.

Fortunately, the production company works with such quiet professionalism that its people don’t require much direction, and I just let them get on with it. Right now their activity centers on a grotesque sculpture in the middle of the studio, a latex Ronald Reagan mask wearing a cheap white wig, and impaled on a tripod. Below the mask hangs a navy blue blazer on a hanger. This bizarre homunculus is John Madden’s “lighting stand-in.” We can’t afford to have Madden standing around for hours while we get his lighting right, so this thing serves in his place – Madden’s hair is completely white, and the blazer is a duplicate of the one he’ll wear later. The tripod is cranked up to put his “face” at the correct height.

The video people tell me that this is one of the best facilities in the Bay Area. Madden won’t fly and he doesn’t want to travel more than he has to – after all, he travels constantly during the football season – so rather than go somewhere else to film his commercials and other projects, he built a studio in his home town, Pleasanton. He didn’t spare any expense, either: the walls and ceiling are extra-insulated so traffic noise never disturbs the recording, and the air conditioning is specially muffled. The sound stage is huge, the size of a couple of basketball courts, and about three stories high.

Today we’ll be filming, or more accurately, taping, John Madden and his broadcasting partner, Pat Summerall. We’re going to shoot a number of short clips of Pat and John sitting together, apparently in a stadium broadcaster’s booth, discussing the game that the player has chosen to play. These clips aren’t used for most regular season games, but if it’s opening day, or a Thanksgiving Day game, a playoff game, the Super Bowl, or the Pro Bowl, then the player will get to see one of these intros before the game begins. Of course, we have no way of knowing in advance which two teams will be playing in the game. There will be 31 teams in the upcoming NFL season, and they can theoretically play each other in 465 possible combinations. We can’t shoot 465 clips – apart from the time it would take, there isn’t room on the CD to store them all – so the material we’re recording has to be generic. They’ll talk about the weather conditions, Madden’s preference for real grass fields, the significance of the game at this point in the playoffs, and so on.

Tomorrow we’ll finish taping Pat and John and move on to James Brown, our EA Sports Studio host (and actually the anchor of Fox’s broadcasts). J.B. is a warm and extremely funny man, and a positive delight to work with. Harvard-educated, he occasionally does the material we’ve written for him in a homeboy vernacular that has the whole crew howling with laughter. We can’t ever use it; in fact some of the things he says we don’t even dare show to anyone outside the team. But over the years we’ve assembled a hilarious private collection of out-takes.

After five years of doing this it’s familiar now, but I’m still worried about the missing Ultimatte operator. An Ultimatte is an expensive piece of gear that makes a person standing in front of a blue (or green) screen look as if he’s standing somewhere else by superimposing, or “matting”, his image onto a background image – in our case, the stadium broadcaster’s booth. This “booth” is actually a computer graphics image created by our artists. It’s not a single image but an endless loop so that it looks like there’s a little movement in the crowd outside the windows. The crowd is deliberately out of focus so it won’t be too obvious that it’s just a loop.

Matting, or “keying” as it’s called in television terminology, is a standard trick to save money. But an Ultimatte is a fiddly device; it takes forever to set one up and get it tweaked just right. For one thing, the lighting on the subject has to match the lighting in the background image. Otherwise the whole thing looks wrong: you see someone who’s brightly lit in a dark place, or lit by yellowish light while the background is lit by bluish light. We spent all day yesterday getting this figured out, and now everything should be dialed in correctly. But we still need the Ultimatte guy here to do the shoot. I can’t afford to have Madden, Summerall, and a whole video crew standing around waiting for one person.

The teleprompter operator comes over to talk to me. Her gear is ready to go, but she needs the floppy disk that contains the script. The teleprompter is a clever device, a laptop computer connected to a monitor mounted below the camera, facing upwards towards the ceiling and displaying the script – backwards. A one-way mirror in front of the camera lens inverts the words into readable text and reflects them towards the talent. The camera looks through the mirror from behind and doesn’t see the words, but Pat and John can read them while looking straight into the lens. They won’t simply read whatever it says, though, because we’re trying to create the impression of an impromptu conversation between the announcers, the kind of thing that normally precedes a football broadcast. They’ll look at the teleprompter before each take in order to get a sense of what we want, then improvise somewhat on the material I’ve written. We often make changes as we go along. If we find that Pat or John is consistently stumbling over a line, we’ll type in something new. I was up late last night making changes to the script – as usual, at the last minute the marketing department wanted some material of their own added – which is why it wasn’t ready until now.

There’s a legend around EA that the first time somebody wrote an audio script for John Madden, they didn’t put much effort into it: just wrote a lot of generic football commentary. Madden took one look, threw it down, and said, “I’m not going to read this s—.” For several years after that, all the voiceover audio in the game was ad-libbed. Because it consisted only of “Maddenisms” – short interjections like “Boom!” and “Where’d that truck come from?!” – on the Genesis and SNES, this didn’t matter much. But when the time came to do the 3DO edition, we needed a lot more material, and that meant a real script. In order to produce something that he would be willing to read, I became an expert on the Madden persona. I transcribed three entire football broadcasts word-for-word. I studied his vocabulary and grammar, his inflection and pacing. Finally, in great fear and trepidation, I gave him my script. The work paid off. He read it, performed it, and didn’t complain. Madden seldom praises anything. He’s still a football coach at heart; you can tell he’s pleased with you if he’s not tearing your head off. Once I accidentally typed “backtracking” when I meant “backpedaling” – the motion linebackers make when they’re backing up and watching the quarterback at the same time. John stopped short and spent the next two minutes telling me in no uncertain terms that “backtracking” was not a word he ever had, or ever would, use in his life.

Hi everyone! Last week we shared part one of The Sinking City hero origin story and we heard you liked it. If you missed it, you can still read it here.

In The Sinking City, you play as Charles Reed, a 1920s private investigator tortured by his past and seeking to salvation while exploring a strange flooded city. We finally could make sense of Charles’s scattered notes, so without further ado, please enjoy the second part of our The Sinking City short origin story!

Journal of Charles W. Reed, 1918

Chapter Two

It happened again last night. I woke up next to this flooded narrow hole in the ground, a hundred meters away from the USS Cyclops debris… and the decaying bodies of my friends. Judging by the dirt under my nails, I tried to dig my way into it. What’s so important down there, I wonder?

That hole was the first thing I saw after I was washed ashore this god-forsaken island. I think it’s been two weeks, and I haven’t seen a single soul since then, well, living soul anyway. I buried some of my crewmates, the ones I managed to carry to their improvised graves anyway… I haven’t eaten anything aside from the rotten shellfish I found on the seashore when I woke up. I can barely move, but strangely enough, it seems like I magically gain a lot of strength at night if I’m able to sleepwalk all the way across the island from my comfy cave to that stinking pit.

That hole is not the only foul thing here. This whole place smells like death, there’s something in the air that I cannot escape. I carry the gun I found on one of the bodies, but even though there are bullets in the clip, I have no use for it. It’s not like I can go hunting for food. The whole place is dead.

It’s been three more days. I’m pretty desperate. Have to do something, because otherwise I’ll just starve to death. I’m going in that hole. What’s the point of being a Navy diver if I can’t dive in a hole in the ground?

I crawled into the pit. The water was lukewarm and thick like blood or oil. I held my breath and dived, trying to push my body down as fast as I could. Who knows how deep this is, but I don’t think I’ll die here. I survived the shipwreck, ended up on this island, with this hole calling out to my sleeping self. It’s all happening for a reason, and I doubt that reason is for me to drown in this cesspool. Wouldn’t be poetic.

When I finally reached the bottom, I saw a glimpse of light ahead. I rushed toward it, and emerged into what seemed to be an underground cave. Trying to catch my breath, I looked around. Something caught my attention, the same unnatural ruins that I saw in my dreams on the Cyclops. Now that I can see them clearly, they looks like some sort of a lair, with two diagonal rocks facing each other. I want to touch them.

Agonizing pain shot through my palm the moment I land it on one of the rocks. They lit up, emitting strange glowing into the air, yellowish marks started to appear on them. They seemed like a gate to another dimension, it was like someone or something was about to come through it. I looked up and suddenly saw the skies – was I not in a cave this whole time?

I caught a glimpse of a slimy black worm burrowing into my hand. I tried to shake it off, but it was gone in a moment. Sudden clarity came upon me, I was on my knees staring at the gates, finally I saw an enormous shadow in it… No, there was nothing.

“Wake him up!” a voice penetrated the silence, their hands were shaking my restless body. When I opened my eyes I saw a few men standing around me, military, judging by their uniforms. When they were carrying me to their boat, I looked around. I saw a dark silhouette, pointing in the direction of the flooded hole. I knew I was the only one who saw it. “It’s okay”, I thought. “I know what I saw. I know there’s something out there, and I will find it”.

“Sir”, I said and one of the soldiers looked at me. “Get the bodies on the beach, please! Their families must learn what happened to them”.

“Bodies?” he asked looking puzzled.

“Bodies” I repeated suddenly becoming annoyed. “You must have seen the debris of my ship, and the rotting corpses too. Ring a bell?”

“Look, pal, I have no idea what you are on about. There’s no bodies here, no debris, no nothing. You seeing things or something?” 

The end. Well, the end of that story, which marks the beginning of The Sinking City, our adventure and investigation game inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Play as Charles W. Reed, private investigator, to uncover the truth of what possesses the half-submerged city of Oakmont, right now on Xbox One!

The Sinking City is available now on the Microsoft Store for Xbox One. Click here for purchase details.