New Iron Throne Console Revealed for Xbox’s Game of Thrones Giveaway
Last week, we announced a new Game of Thrones sweepstakes featuring custom House Targaryen and Night King designed consoles, and you didn’t think we’d just stop there, did you? We’re thrilled to unveil this giveaway will also include a third prize – an Iron Throne designed custom console! The fight to rule from the Iron Throne started nearly a decade ago and launched countless wars, battles and betrayals. It’s almost time to see who will reign victorious over the Seven Kingdoms, and it’s only right we made an epic custom console to honor this moment in television history.
Just like the Iron Throne that sits in King’s Landing, the console features the swords of enemies that surrendered to Aegon the Conquerer. This is only the third custom design created for the newest member of the Xbox One family – the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. Built for disc-free gaming and entertainment, the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition comes bundled with Minecraft, Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 3. This Iron Throne console is truly fitting of the king or queen of Westeros!
Open until May 22, fans just need to RT our official Twitter post or “like” the official Facebook post announcing the giveaway. At the end of the giveaway, only three fans will be able to game with House Targaryen, the Night King or the Iron Throne at their side. What new heights will your gaming reach with “Game of Thrones” at your side? For full giveaway rules, see here.
Fans can also pre-order Season 8 of Game of Thrones on Xbox with Microsoft Movies & TV and receive an exclusive Iron Throne avatar with their purchase. For those who pre-order the “Game of Thrones” Seasons 1-8 Complete Series digital bundle, you’ll get the Iron Throne avatar plus two additional avatars. Full details here.
Don’t forget to tune in to the “Game of Thrones” series finale on May 19 to see what prophecies come to life, which characters will give their lives to their cause, or whom – if anyone – is left as the new ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.
Your favorite characters have killed, schemed, risen back from the dead and much more in their quest to ascend onto the Iron Throne. Don’t miss out, these custom consoles are the ultimate prize for gamers and “Game of Thrones” fans around the world!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-22-2019, 09:49 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Dauntless Officially Launches Out Of Beta With Cross-Play Support
The action-RPG Dauntless has officially launched, ending a year-long open beta. The free-to-play game is now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC through the Epic Games Store. Phoenix Labs notes that this official launch fulfills its promise of cross-platform functionality, letting you play with friends regardless of platform or take your account with you.
The launch also comes alongside several updates. A new Mastery system lets you refine your skills and achieve rewards, and each Behemoth and weapon have their own unique Mastery cards to customize. The campaign has also been revised, and the update includes the new Season 5 Hunt Pass, named Hidden Blades. Hidden Blades opens a Moon Blossom festival and unlocks a bunch of new cosmetic rewards as you work your way through the levels.
As previously announced, this update launches alongside the new Arcslayer pack. It comes with a set of mech-inspired armor, consumables, and some premium currency. Switch and mobile versions are in development but a release date for either has not been announced.
"No one has ever launched on console with full cross-play support from the start, but we believed in our vision and, thankfully, our friends at Epic Games, Sony, and Microsoft did too," said Phoenix CEO Jesse Houston. "Keeping the community connected is one of our top priorities, and with all the new players coming in at launch, there's never been a better time to be a Slayer in Dauntless."
We Can’t Wait for Terraforming Mars Mobile to leave Beta
By Michael Coffer21 May 2019
Like many greats before it and to come, Terraforming Mars is both a hybrid of existing archetypes and something fresh all its own. The digital app stays true to that ground-breaking (pioneering, geoforming) spirit. It features robust AI, a thorough tutorial, and generally well-organized menus and interface, as well a pretty sophisticated online multiplayer. If the beta is any indication, the final release is going to be spectacular, launching an already popular game into the stratosphere. Accessible and quick, the game’s app is about as good as it can (and should) be.
Just like with older, established Eurogames like Castles of Burgundy or Princes of Florence, Terraforming Mars comes down to cold, hard Victory Points. It scrambles the path to acquire them, making players undertake the seminal work of, you know, actually terraforming Mars. There are a host of resources, card types, and effects to cross-reference, the sort of thing that produces grand strategy through a million cogs and gears. Featuring a great level of competition and finesse, the game is also about ecological creation as much as it is economic competition, and it is this push-and-pull between the two which animates the core gameplay.
The tabletop game is excellent, but full of borderline busywork as everyone trundles through the phases of a turn. Not for nothing does it call its’ turns ‘Generations’. It takes time because the decisions are agonizing, and there are so many to fuss with. Map layout is crucial, card management & memorizing the deck are almost must-haves for build planning. The bean-counting of resource generation, not to mention cost-benefit analysis, are all important and mentally taxing. Dozens of hotspots of activity and intel need to be on the player’s radar more or less constantly to allow peak performance.
Fortunately, the app organizes these multiple variables into a single screen, with the map dead centre, an individual player’s attributes along the bottom row, and the full player roster on the left-hand side. Details of how many effects, tags or cards someone has are behind tabs, which work like drop-down menus would. In short, the information is logically nested and more easily researched here than on a sprawling table. (For five player, anyways). Another benefit of the layout is that each player can separately spend their time between turns parsing the information most relevant to their aims discreetly and with a minimum of fuss. Terraforming Mars has a little bit of disruption and player interaction, more-so in the (superior) drafting variant, so the fact the app makes opposition research a breeze is no trifling matter.
The multiplayer lobby and experience is equally polished, though it does require an active Asmodee account (to be fair, that one account will cover any of their digital properties, so you get your mileage). In lieu of matchmaking, players host and join each other’s games, with ranking determined by the existing ELO scores of the participants. There’s a chat lobby, which was relatively lively and handy despite only being in beta. Games are ‘asynchronous’ in the sense that they are disconnect-friendly; each player can be replaced by a bot or will auto-forfeit if they are away for too long; otherwise the game preserves a snapshot of the last stage. Because a game will last between one to two hours, the soft asynch option will prove a great fit for those craving regular play amidst the micro-interruptions of everyday life.
This tired broken record of a pre-re-viewer must dutifully report that the game, which I hadn’t played in ages, has aged excellently. Moreover, its digital incarnation is fast displacing the bulky physical predecessor. Some games (Can’t Stop, Targi, a host of others) are simple enough in gameplay and small enough in shelf-space to keep around, but for complicated, intense games a good app breathes second life into the original’s excellence and lets those Kondo-ing their collections a way to say goodbye without excising the game from their repertoire entirely.
Terraforming Mars has been ‘almost out’ for over a year now, so it’s hard to say how much longer the wait will be (or the price of the app), but before the end of 2019 is a safe bet.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-22-2019, 02:54 AM - Forum: Lounge
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The Most Influential Games Of The 21st Century: Halo: Combat Evolved
Join GameSpot as we celebrate gaming history and give recognition to the most influential games of the 21st century. These aren't the best games, and they aren't necessarily games that you need to rush out and play today, but there's no question that they left an indelible impact on game developers, players, and in some cases, society at large.
It's hard to explain what it was like to be a console first-person shooter fan in 2001. While PC players had been enjoying FPS games for years, the experience was never as strong on consoles. Where PCs had the fluidity of the mouse-and-keyboard setup, controls on console struggled to capture the same feel--to this day, two of the best-regarded FPS games of the era, GoldenEye 64 and its follow-up, Perfect Dark, were played with controllers that didn't even sport dual analog sticks. In the nascent days of console online multiplayer, squaring off against other players, the thing that could really make shooters exciting, was limited to split-screen battles (often on tiny TVs). There were standout titles of the era, of course, but the FPS field was nothing like what we experience today.
Imagine, then, the arrival of Halo: Combat Evolved. For the first time, the discussion around console shooters opens up to a huge number of new possibilities. The Xbox's system link multiplayer, the console market's first experience with LAN, meant you could play with seven other friends--and more than that, you could work together as teams and execute tactics that your opponents couldn't anticipate simply by glancing over at your side of the screen. For those whose gaming consisted purely of console experiences, it was the first time a shooter experience would become something similar to playing paintball or laser tag. It was a glimpse of the possibilities of the shooting genre's future, and it was glorious.
Halo's arrival on the console FPS scene didn't just herald the shooter future, it manifested it. From the jump, the game was unmatched. In the very first mission, as players took on the role of genetically enhanced supersoldier Master Chief, developer Bungie was throwing together elements that shifted how playing shooters felt on a fundamental level. First and foremost was the enemy design. The alien Covenant were generally not idiots--they fought hard and smart, taking cover when they were hurt, grouping up to channel their fire, throwing grenades to flush you out of your hiding places, and charging up when they knew they had you on the ropes. Every encounter with an Elite enemy in the original Halo was a harrowing one, because the bastards weren't just tough and didn't just absorb a lot of shots. They were also very good at finding ways to kill you (and never missed a chance to laugh about it afterward).
Bungie set a standard with enemy AI design in Halo. But it also did a lot to make its fights feel more like battles, capturing a feeling that many shooters have chased ever since. The mostly-pretty-good AI extended to allies as well, and much of the time in Halo, you're fighting the Covenant with the support of a squad of UNSC Marines. You might be a one-player army in Halo, but you always felt like part of a team, and excited shouts of your squadmates as you take down a big enemy or set off a big explosion (as well as their cries as they got blasted by grenades) created the sense that there was more to Halo than just your role in the game. Few titles captured the feeling of stepping straight into a full, realized world the way Halo did, and a huge part of that was the idea that you were just one (really good) soldier in a much larger, active army.
Halo felt like it was doing something video games had always wanted to do, but had never quite achieved before.
So many of those battles managed to take on an epic scale thanks to Halo's perfect combination of elements. Huge fields often had vehicles crossing them, some of which you had to deal with on foot, others which you could battle in tanks or Warthogs of your own, with marines jumping into the gunner positions to back you up. A phenomenal soundtrack and Bungie's cinematic approach made those moments even more exhilarating, expanding the scope even further. The game's smart level design gave you tons of agency--you could pick your way through engagements, slamming straight into enemies or finding ways to flank them out while your squad distracted them, hunting down vehicles or rocket launchers to turn the tide in your favor, or sneaking past enemies and avoiding fights altogether.
Halo felt expansive in a new way for shooters, setting the tone for massive, cinematic, action movie-like games that would follow. Level after level, Halo felt like it was doing something video games had always wanted to do, but had never quite achieved before. It wasn't necessarily inventing new things, but it took the best ideas of the genre and turned them into a singular experience. When it comes to the AAA shooter experience as we now know it, Bungie cracked the code with Halo.
Shooters are still feeling the influence of some of the best and freshest ideas of Halo. The ability to carry only two weapons and think strategically about which you pick up? Halo. Recharging shields that force you to find a shady spot and consider your tactical options mid-fight? Halo. Grenades on a trigger button, ready at all times? Halo. The standard in console FPS control schemes? Halo again. The franchise it spawned was such a powerhouse that for years, developers and publishers hoped their games might become the "Halo-killer" to usurp its place at the top of the shooter heap.
Bungie elevated console shooters with Halo, but the even bigger lasting influence of the game might be how it shook the console landscape by legitimizing Microsoft's Xbox. When Microsoft decided to leap into the console market, there was no shortage of skepticism, but Halo was the reason to purchase the new machine. The game proved that Microsoft was not just some late-comer trying to use an abundance of cash to muscle out the dominant PlayStation, and it would be Halo's sequels that helped make Microsoft a bigger force through Xbox Live. Through its role as an Xbox exclusive, Halo helped lay the foundation for the next two decades of what gaming would become.
Halo changed the conception of what games could be for a lot of players. It rocked the shooter world with ideas that have become standards to this day, and its approaches to gameplay and presentation made for that truly "epic" experience that games have continued to try to capitalize on ever since. But more than anything, it altered gaming for console players, elevating the experience with an amazing single-player campaign, a huge and expansive game world, and the first steps into the future of multiplayer. Playing Halo in 2001, it felt like things had changed--almost 20 years later, we're still feeling the shockwaves.
Limited Run Games Releasing Dragon’s Lair Trilogy Collector’s Edition
At the start of the year, a Switch box art for Dragon’s Lair Trilogy was spotted on Nintendo’s official website. At the time, it was enough to convince fans a physical release on the way. It even revealed Limited Run Games would be handling the hard copy publishing rights.
Fast forward to the month of May and LRG is now offering a limited collector’s edition for hardcore Dragon’s Lair fan. This $79.99 version includes a poster, enamel pin and themed papercraft, with pre-orders opening this Friday. Below is a look at what you’ll get, along with the official announcement:
For the die-hard Dragon’s Lair fan, there will be a Collector’s Edition available in limited quantity this Friday, 5/24 at 10am & 6pm EDT. This CE includes a poster, enamel pin, and arcade cabinet papercraft… perfect for recreating @Stranger_Things
The owner of Limited Run Games, Josh Fairhurst, even chimed in to reveal some more information about what to expect:
“This is a premium box that has light-activated sound which plays when the drawer is pulled out (it plays the “Lead on adventurer – your quest awaits!” line from the game’s attract mode).”
Of course, there’ll also be a standard edition made available on the same day (24th May), if you would prefer this.
As we’ve previously noted, the trilogy contains Dragon’s Lair, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp and Space Ace – where you take control of Ace instead of Dirk. These games are comprised of cinematic quick-time events with animation from Don Bluth. The first game was released in arcades in 1983, Space Ace came out in 1984 and Dragon’s Lair II arrived in 1991.
Do you have room in your physical Switch collection for this trilogy? Tell us down in the comments.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-22-2019, 02:54 AM - Forum: Windows
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Harnessing big data in pediatric research to reimagine healthcare
For many of us, life begins in the hospital—and so does our health data. Health organizations worldwide are amassing more information than ever before from millions of patients throughout their lifetimes. Wrangling massive volumes of health data—from smart devices, medical devices, electronic medical records and community health systems—is no small task, but cloud computing offers researchers a promising way to tap into this resource to achieve meaningful medical progress and improved patient outcomes. Microsoft for Healthcare aims to do just that: harness the power of data to reimagine healthcare, improve the health of the population, and, ultimately, help save lives.
YouTube Video
Zeroing in on clues
One of the most promising examples of this is in our collaboration with Seattle Children’s Research Institute. We are working together to find clues to a persistent and tragic medical mystery that hits close to home: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Every year, more than 3,500 infants die of SIDS-related causes in the United States. One of these children was the son of John Kahan, my colleague and Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer. John has made it his mission for no parent to lose a child to SIDS, and with his data science team at Microsoft and our friends at Seattle Children’s, they are working toward that goal in earnest.
The team started with publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 26 million births and deaths, and along with other data sets, studied 90 columns of data about every child born in the U.S. over a six-year period. Through this data science effort done in the cloud on Microsoft Azure, they discovered several correlations that showed statistical increases in SIDS. They then brought those findings to Seattle Children’s Research Institute, one of the world leaders in pediatric genomics and brain research— and lucky for us, right in our backyard.
Since then, we’ve been working together to expand the effort and the science, creating a collaborative genomics database for Seattle Children’s and the top SIDS medical researchers worldwide, and a world-class team of Microsoft data scientists. Together, we recently published our first manuscript from this collaboration in the peer-reviewed medical journal, Pediatrics, in which we used advanced modelling techniques to analyze the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and SIDS-related deaths. Going forward, the hope is to use sequenced whole genomes as an additional data set along with the CDC data and other information in Microsoft Azure, helping to identify SIDS risk factors and, ultimately, ways to help prevent SIDS.
Similarly, we’ve been able to assist pediatric cancer researchers. Working with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and our partner DNAnexus, we’ve been thrilled to be a part of the creation of the St. Jude Cloud—a cloud-based data-sharing and collaboration environment based on Microsoft Azure that contains an extensive public repository of pediatric cancer genomics data. St. Jude Cloud stores and shares thousands of cancer patient samples mapped against the human genome template, enabling researchers around the world to access and exchange data on a global basis. Researchers from more than 450 institutions across 16 countries now have immediate access to data that previously could take weeks to download, as well as access to complex computational analysis pipelines. The availability of this data could lead to progress in eradicating childhood cancer.
Clues like these seed future research, turning mere hints into new medical and biological knowledge, diagnostics, or therapeutics. Like John Kahan, many of our data scientists have been touched personally by medical or health issues and are exceptionally motivated to help solve these puzzles.
Reimagining healthcare
Collaborations like those with Seattle Children’s and St. Jude are just the beginning. Our technology is in virtually every healthcare organization in the world, from a nurse-led clinic in Kenya to larger organizations like Kaiser Permanente in the United States and NHS Glasgow and Clyde in the United Kingdom, putting us in a unique position to build and expand solutions with cloud computing and AI.
For us, reimagining healthcare starts with finding well-defined and well-scoped problems, then bringing together the best minds from a diverse set of disciplines and people—computer science, AI and data science, bioscience and medical—to solve them.
By analyzing masses of data with trusted cloud computing, one health concern at a time, we have a chance to extract new knowledge that could make a positive difference—empowering healthcare teams, improving operational outcomes and care coordination, and personalizing care.
Join us in reimagining healthcare. To learn more about harnessing the power of health data with cloud computing, take a look at our new e-book A New Framework for Healthcare in a Digital World. For a deeper dive on Microsoft Genomics visit here.
Save up to $1,000 on 2018 MacBook Pros with these blowout deals
Exclusive
By Christine McKee Tuesday, May 21, 2019, 04:27 pm PT (07:27 pm ET)
More price drops are in, and these special markdowns are available exclusively for AppleInsider readers. Save $500 to $1,000 instantly on 2018 15-inch MacBook Pros featuring 32GB of memory and at least 1TB of storage. In addition to the lowest prices ever, shoppers can take advantage of no interest financing or a sales tax refund, further adding to the savings.
Delivering the lowest prices ever on loaded Mid 2018 15-inch MacBook Pros, these exclusive deals knock $500 to $1,000 off configurations with 32GB of memory and at least 1TB of storage. Readers can also find models with upgraded graphics for a nice performance boost over the standard 2018 spec.
Along with the exclusive savings, B&H is tacking on free expedited shipping within the contiguous U.S., so you can get up and running quickly — usually in as little as one to three business days. Special financing incentives are also available, ranging from no interest when paid in full within 12 months with the B&H Financing Credit Card to a sales tax refund in qualifying states via the new B&H Payboo Card. It’s definitely worth looking into the financing incentives, especially if you want to spread the payments out over time or live in a state eligible for the Payboo tax-equivalent loyalty rebate.
To see how these discounts stack up against the competition, be sure to check out our 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide for up-to-date pricing across top Apple authorized resellers. At press time, these prices are the lowest available by at least $200 to $400.
How to activate the deals
These Apple deals are link-activated and require shoppers to use the special pricing links in this post or in our Price Guide from a laptop, desktop or iPad. They will not work in mobile apps, including B&H’s iOS app. Step-by-step instructions for redeeming the discounts can be found below.
Instructions: To activate the deals, simply click through the B&H pricing links above using AppleInsider’s desktop site and look for the advertised prices.
Please note: These offers cannot be activated through the B&H and AppleInsider apps at this time. If you still cannot see the exclusive prices using the desktop site, all is not lost! Need help? Send us a note at [email protected] and we will do our best to assist. Prices are set to expire on May 28.
Additional Apple Deals
AppleInsider and Apple authorized resellers are also running a handful of additional exclusive promotions this month on Apple hardware that will not only deliver the lowest prices on many of the items, but also throw in discounts on AppleCare, software and accessories. These deals are as follows:
Observation is a sci-fi thriller uncovering what happened to Dr. Emma Fisher, and the crew of her mission, through the lens of the station?s artificial intelligence S.A.M. Players assume the role of S.A.M. by operating the station?s control systems, cameras, and tools to assist Emma in discovering what is happening to the station, the vanished crew, and S.A.M. himself.
