We’ve managed to cover a lot of bases this week, which always makes me happy: we started things off with a review exclusive, and we finally reviewed Shards of Infinity. We also had a little play around with the Terraforming Mars mobile beta, which is coming along very well.
As a quick FYI there will be no Weekender update next Friday. I’m away on holiday, and while I’ll be leaving you in Ian’s capable hands, I’m not asking him to put together the full shebang, so you’ll have to do without it for a week. Normal service will resume week after.
We were very pleased to be able to go live with our Fort Sumter review before anyone else, so many thanks to Playdek for giving us that opportunity. In case this has flown by you – Fort Sumter is a digital port of a physical boardgame of the same name that try’s to simulate the tension and machinations that lead to the American Civil War.
This two-player strategy game has all of the tension and nuance of something like Twilight Struggle but is playable in only a fraction of the time, and Playdek have done an excellent job. Check out our review for more.
TheoTown (iOS & Android) – Full review coming soon!
We haven’t had a decent city builder to look at it in a while, but TheoTown may just fit the bill. It’s been out on Android for around five years now and has a very dedicated community online, but this new version will be available on both iOS and PC. The new version comes with elevated terrain as a feature, which is something the community has been asking about for a while.
We’ll try and get a full review of this game up ASAP.
It’s not a game, but in a similar vein to the Steam Link release on iOS a couple of weeks ago, we thought we might as well throw this your way as well. Valve have spun-out their ‘nu style’ chat interface (which was designed to combat things like Discord on the PC) into its own app. No voice chat yet, but it’s coming and the app has plenty of other functionality that you’d want from something like this.
Handy if you happen to do a lot of communicating via Steam Chat, as the current Steam Mobile app is rather clunky and difficult to use. It also hasn’t been updated in a couple years now, but Steam have said they’ll be improving its security functions and possible doing something else with it further down the road.
ODD is an excellent card-based dungeon crawler whose only sin was the fact that it was only playable on tablets. Today we’re pleased to report that nearly a year later, the game is now playable on your phones in portrait mode.
Sales
There’s a fair few sales this week that might tickle your fancy:
First up, in celebration of the move to phones, One Deck Dungeon is discounted by nearly 50% on both iOS & Android.
One of our past all-time favourite roguelikes, Sir Questionnaire, is currently going cheap on iOS.
All of the Reigns games are also going cheap on iOS, although only our favourite – Reigns: Game of Thrones, is also discounted on Android.
Google and Binomial Open Source Basis Universal Texture Format
One common problem with game development is compression, it’s a classic trade-off. Do you save disk space at the cost of either performance or VRAM usage or do you favor performance at the cost of size? When it comes to GPU Image Textures, this is exactly the trade-off Binomial is trying to get rid off. Thanks to a recent partnership with Google, their work is now available and open source!
Today, Google and Binomial are excited to announce that we have partnered to open source the Basis Universal texture codec to improve the performance of transmitting images on the web and within desktop and mobile applications, while maintaining GPU efficiency. This release fills an important gap in the graphics compression ecosystem and complements earlier work in Draco geometry compression.
The Basis Universal texture format is 6-8 times smaller than JPEG on the GPU, yet is a similar storage size as JPEG – making it a great alternative to current GPU compression methods that are inefficient and don’t operate cross platform – and provides a more performant alternative to JPEG/PNG. It creates compressed textures that work well in a variety of use cases – games, virtual & augmented reality, maps, photos, small-videos, and more!
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How does it all work? Compress your image using the encoder, choosing the quality settings that make sense for your project (you can also submit multiple images for small videos or optimization purposes, just know they’ll share the same color palette). Insert the transcoder code before rendering, which will turn the intermediary format into the GPU format your computer can read. The image stays compressed throughout this process, even on your GPU! Instead of needing to decode and read the whole image, the GPU will read only the parts it needs. Enjoy the performance benefits!
The project is available now, open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. This new technology should be a great boon to game engines and tools hoping to support texture compression across a number of devices, and I assume will make it’s way into more Google products as time goes on.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-25-2019, 01:05 AM - Forum: Lounge
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New Overwatch Event Makes Your Skin Choice Matter
Overwatch League, the official competitive scene for Blizzard's team shooter, is pitting fans against each other to win the honor of topping the teams. The winning team gets to take over the official OWL Instagram account.
From May 27-31, equip an Overwatch League team hero skin and take part in Quick Play or Competitive matches. Each match you complete earns one point for the team you're representing, and the winning team will be announced on June 3. It all works similar to Splatoon's Splatfests, which tie team colors to surveys.
The announcement notes that you must complete a match for your point to register, including overtime. It's okay if you need to switch to a different hero, as long as you were wearing a team skin at some point during the match. It also doesn't matter if you're wearing the Home or Away skin. You can also contribute points on Twitter by tweeting with the #MyOWLTeam hashtag and tagging your favorite team. Blizzard promises that stage three of the event will begin on June 6, but it didn't specify exactly what that will entail.
This is run concurrently with the middle of the Overwatch Anniversary event, which runs through June 10. As usual that has introduced a bunch of new skins, as well as other cosmetics and rotating brawls. Still, if you're a fan of the Los Angeles Gladiators or the Philadelphia Fusion, you may want to put aside your Honeydew Mei or Gargoyle Winston temporarily and support the team.
Apple Card is the subscription that pays you to use it
Apple Card works just like any other Apple Pay account, but the software experience Apple is creating around it to enhance digital banking represents both a new Services venture and also an additional reason for users to keep buying hardware. That’s why Apple is paying its customers to use it.
Apple Card and the reverse subscription
Compared to the other new Services Apple announced in March — Apple Arcade video games, News+ periodicals and TV+ original content — Apple Card isn’t a subscription. Apple Card is actually the opposite of a subscription: using it pays you back via Daily Cash rebates.
This “free money” comes from the merchants who accept credit cards. Whenever you pay with any card, the merchant accepting your payment pays the card-issuing bank a fee. It’s common for card issuers to offer buyers “cash back,” which returns part of the fee collected to the buyer.
The cash back idea — along with no annual fee — was devised by Sears in the mid 80s when it introduced Discover in an attempt to break into the card business. By offering users cash back, it could attract customers otherwise happy with their existing cards. Additionally, the cash back promotion served as an incentive to spend more.
The idea of using credit to not just finance but incentivize consumer behavior was also explored by Apple. A 1984 Byte advertisement outlined “Apple Card,” a credit card exclusively for buying “Apple Computers, peripherals and software.” Twenty years later, Steve Jobs proposed a vanity credit card that paid out points for use in buying iTunes songs. Today a variety of cards offer some system of rewards in the form of points, airline miles, cash back or other incentives.
A less advanced Apple Card, 35 years ago, also sought to influence buyer behavior.
Apple’s original spin on the idea of cash back is to make rebates immediate and obvious, so you are aware that you are “getting money” every time you use it. But it also has a second component: rather than simply applying your cash back to your account, the Daily Cash credits are loaded onto your separate Apple Pay Cash account. That’s the personal spending account Apple earlier set up with Discover to enable free person-to-person Apple Pay transactions similar to PayPal or Venmo.
Offering its vast installed base of the world’s most affluent buyers a new Apple Card account is therefore a two-pronged strategy to induce Apple Pay transactions: when you make a purchase, a small rebate is applied to Apple Pay Cash, encouraging you to use that money to pay a friend or split a tab using a second Apple Pay transaction.
Apple wants to encourage NFC Apple Pay transactions, but more importantly it wants to make using Apple Pay routine. The company has previously noted that in countries where there’s an NFC transit system driving a critical mass of transactions, Apple Pay is more rapidly adopted as a payment system for other purchases, too.
Apple Card’s “Daily Cash” feature also promotes the use of Apple Pay Cash
Apple Pay and NFC vs the Mag Stripes
Apple Pay has been working to push the world toward more secure NFC transactions, which never expose your account number and protect the near field wireless transaction with an encrypted conversation between the terminal reader and a device’s silicon “secure element.”
However, much of the world — including a lot of the United States — is still stuck in the really old world of 1960s-era magnetic stripe transactions, which requires a physical card with a stretch of old cassette tape stuck on the back that can be read by a magnetic head in a credit card swipe machine.
That status quo at the launch of Apple Pay in 2014 informed Samsung’s plans to acquire LoopPay, a company that had developed a way to fake a magnetic swipe by generating an encoded magnetic field conveying the same data recorded on physical credit cards.
Apple — like Google — focused entirely on NFC, meaning that if you have a card enrolled in Apple Pay and a vendor doesn’t accept NFC payments, you have to pull out your physical card to either swipe it or insert it to use the card’s EMV chip.
Rather than try to retain compatibility with old mag stripe readers, Apple built an NFC-only system for iOS with an archaic card to serve as a legacy shim
Apple wasn’t simply trying to move all transactions to its devices; it was purely interested in promoting NFC as the payment solution. One of the benefits of only supporting NFC is that unlike Samsung, Apple doesn’t have to include and support a second mag stripe reader system on its devices, now and into the future.
Apple is notorious for killing legacy and aggressively dragging its users kicking and screaming into the future. If the world were being lead by Samsung, we would never need to phase out mag stripes, and probably wouldn’t. But by shifting its large, affluent base of users exclusively to NFC payments, Apple can make the future happen sooner, just as it did back in 1998 with USB, and now with USB-C.
Many pundits found it very convincing that Samsung would outperform Apple in mobile payments by offering legacy support for the once-ubiquitous old mag swipe readers. Three years after it adopted LoopPay’s technology on its Samsung Pay enabled phones, however, Samsung’s share of mobile wallet transactions was at 17% compared to 77% for Apple Pay.
In 2014, it looked like LoopPay was going to help Samsung Pay beat Apple Pay.
Certainly part of that disparity is due to Apple’s much larger installed base of premium users. Virtually all modern iPhones in use support Apple Pay; Samsung Pay is limited to the company’s higher-end Galaxy S and Note flagships, a much smaller base of users that’s only about a sixth of all Samsung phone buyers. That’s another example of how Samsung’s impact on the future of tech is far lower than its shipments would suggest.
However, NFC use isn’t simply a matter of technology availability. Google pioneered NFC support for Android long before Apple Pay was introduced, and yet despite broad support for NFC on various Androids, the same report noted that Google Pay adoption was only at 6%.
The real challenge for inducing NFC adoption wasn’t merely rolling out technology. It was changing behavior, both in convincing buyers to use it and in convincing banks and merchants to support it. That’s been the task of Apple VP Jennifer Bailey, the executive in charge of Apple Pay.
It certainly helped Apple that Google had spent years and tons of money trying to promote NFC. However, Bailey’s group has also worked to promote Apple Pay to users. Most recently it has worked to link Apple Pay to common transactions, notably transit fares and the area of “access,” which uses NFC to enable campus, hospitality and enterprise Wallet app ID cards to open doors as well as make payments.
NFC is used at Apple Park to control access. Apple has also issued NFC badges to attendees at its Worldwide Developer Conference, but these aren’t loaded into Wallet because it appears there’s currently no way to install a globally unique, non-transferable pass to a specific device. We will likely hear more about Apple Pay and NFC at WWDC19, which is now just over a week away.
Another PC Game Is Free At Humble, And It's A Strange One
Humble Bundle has been on a roll with its free game giveaways recently, and the latest limited-time freebie is Jalopy, a simulation game about a man and his uncle on a road trip through Eastern Europe. To claim the game for free, all you have to do is sign up for Humble's newsletter, and you'll receive a DRM-free version of the game for Windows PC via email. If you'd prefer a Steam key, you'll also receive a coupon to buy it for $1 between May 25 and June 1. The offer is only available to redeem for a short time, so claim it soon if you're interested.
In Jalopy, the player character and his uncle are driving to Turkey, where his uncle needs to be dropped off in Istanbul. A "jalopy" refers to a car that's old and barely functional, so it's fitting the game revolves around your car, a Laika 601 Deluxe that frequently breaks down and requires constant monitoring. From the amount of weight in your trunk to the state of the car's engine, every factor affects how well your car will fare against the difficulties of the road. You can upgrade your car's parts, but you'll have to find the money for it first.
"It's a very good sign for a game when even losing is fun. Even when you find yourself on the wrong side of a bad decision, staring at a broken bridge miles from anywhere with no fuel, in the rain while the sun is setting, you can't help but laugh," said Danny O'Dwyer in GameSpot's video review of Jalopy. "Like a banged-up car, [the game] is challenging, but Jalopy has a wonderful sense of charm."
There is a story underlining the bizarre road trip taken by your character and his uncle, but it's best to just dive in and experience what Jalopy is all about for yourself--especially since it'll cost you nothing to do so for the next couple of days.
Slay The Spire Brings Single-Player Deck Building To The Switch This June
In August last year, Mega Crit and Humble Bundle announced the hit “card/roguelike” title Slay the Spire was coming to the Switch in 2019. Almost a year later, the developer has now revealed the game will become playable “on-the-go” on 6th June for $24.99.
Here’s what Mega Crit had to say about the announcement over on the game’s official Steam page:
It’s been a while, but we finally have a 100% locked-in date for the release date of Slay the Spire on Switch! We know this has been pretty heavily anticipated, so we can’t wait to get this thing out the door for you all.
If you’re not familiar with Slay the Spire, it was released at the start of this year on Steam and has been positively received so far with plenty of overwhelming reviews. The title is described as a fusion of card games and roguelikes, creating a single-player deck builder game with procedurally generated levels and enemies. Players will spend their time crafting decks, encountering bizarre creatures and discovering relics of immense power – with the ultimate aim being to Slay the Spire!
As we previously explained, there are hundreds of cards to discover and add to your deck. The game environment will also change every time you play and you can choose to take a safer or riskier pathway. Each run is different, featuring different relics and bosses to encounter. Here are some more details, courtesy of the Nintendo website:
Dynamic Deck Building: Choose your cards wisely! Discover hundreds of cards to add to your deck with each attempt at climbing the Spire. Select cards that work together to efficiently dispatch foes and reach the top
– An Ever-changing Spire: Whenever you embark on a journey up the Spire, the layout differs each time. Choose a risky or safe path, face different enemies, choose different cards, discover different relics, and even fight different bosses!
– Powerful Relics to Discover: Powerful items known as relics can be found throughout the Spire. The effects of these relics can greatly enhance your deck through powerful interactions. But beware, obtaining a relic may cost you more than just gold…
Have you been looking forward to this release on the Switch? Tell us below.
Darkwood is a game about survival, exploration and fear, set in mysterious woods somewhere in the territory of the Soviet Bloc. It is a top-down, free-roam, surreal horror experience with a randomized world, taking cues from classic games, where oftentimes you had to figure things out for yourself. By blending RPG, roguelike and adventure elements together with a challenging difficulty, Darkwood aims to please players craving for a deep and rewarding experience.
The fear of unknown is powerful and the unknown will try to remain unseen, forcing you to watch your back. Your senses will be deceived, your sight fooled, your smell tricked by Darkwood's surreal terrors. No answer will be given to you for free, yet somewhere in the woods lies the truth, an explanation to what has happened in this godforsaken place.
Looking for your weakness, your inner demons, only to devour you. Welcome to Darkwood.
Layers of Fear 2 is a first-person psychological horror game with an emphasis on exploration and story. Players control a Hollywood actor who heeds the call of an enigmatic director to take on the lead role in a film shot aboard an ocean liner. Beware, for all may not truly be what it seems.
Layers of Fear 2 is a first-person psychological horror game with an emphasis on exploration and story. Players control a Hollywood actor who heeds the call of an enigmatic director to take on the lead role in a film shot aboard an ocean liner. Beware, for all may not truly be what it seems.
Dauntless launches on consoles with full, day-one crossplay
Phoenix Labs’ free-to-play game Dauntless has launched on the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, a launch that includes cross-platform play and progression on both consoles and PC.
According to the game’s developer, Dauntless is also the first game to launch on console with full crossplay support, something that bodes well for other devs hoping to offer console crossplay in their own upcoming titles.
Crossplay has typically been a hard get for online multi-platform games due to, in the cases of early Minecraft and Fortnite attempts, Sony’s reluctance to support the feature across console lines.
The company has since changed its stance, though crossplay is still something offered on more of a case-by-case basis for PlayStation titles. Games like Fortnite, Rocket League, and now Dauntless have been granted the go-ahead to allow cross-console play since that policy shift last September, though as of a few months ago some developers still said Sony was reluctant to give them the green light.
“When we first started talking about ‘One Dauntless,’ we knew it was a truly audacious goal,” stated Pheonix Labs’ CEO Jesse Houston in a press release. “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.”
The game is also due to launch on Switch and mobile with the same crossplay compatibility in the future.
