Insurgency: Sandstorm is a team-based, tactical FPS based on lethal close quarters combat and objective-oriented multiplayer gameplay. Experience the intensity of modern combat where skill is rewarded, and teamwork wins the fight.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-26-2018, 03:41 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
PlayStation Store's Huge EU January Sale Discounts Hundreds Of PS4 Games
If you thought Christmas seemed to get earlier every year, how about this: Sony has kicked off its January sale on the European PlayStation Store already. Hundreds of PS4, PSVR, PS Vita, and PS3 games are on offer, including some of the biggest games of this year.
A couple of standout open-world games are also on offer: Assassin's Creed Odyssey is down to £30, while the PS4 version of Grand Theft Auto V is available for £13 and Bethesda's latest title, Fallout 76, is on sale for £30.
The sale runs until January 18, with more deals to be added on January 4. For the full list of games on offer, head over to the PlayStation Store. Sony US is also holding a holiday sale right now--check out all the big PS4 game deals on PSN US for more.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-26-2018, 03:41 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Weekly Jobs Roundup: Ubiquity6, Skydance, and more are hiring now!
Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.
Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.
Here are just some of the many, many positions being advertised right now. If you’re a recruiter looking for talent, you can also post jobs here.
Location: San Francisco, California
Ubiquity6 is looking for a developer with experience rapidly building games or other complex experiences in Unity, Unreal or Javascript to join its studio in San Francisco. This role tasks a developer with determining engine feature needs, documenting and recording gameplay footage and feature specifications, and working with other members of the team to rapidly prototype and refine augmented reality features and prototypes. 3D experience is strongly preferred.
Location: New York, New York
The Lead Artist will have a balance of artistic talent, technical knowledge, and leadership skills. This role is critical to the success of the division by leading key projects for the studio. Responsibilities include directing and participating in the production of all visual material, both environments and characters, being accountable for the visual quality delivered while staying within technical limits, managing the project artistic team which will be a mix of internal, remote and outsourcing, and working in partnership with the producer, technical lead and creative lead to hit the project objectives.
Location: Marina Del Rey, California
Skydance Interactive is looking for a Gameplay Engineer to join our studio. In this position you’ll be responsible for maintaining and extending major game subsystems, creating and optimizing gameplay elements, and working with the design team to implement ideas while providing technical and creative feedback. At Skydance Interactive, we believe that a small, focused, and dedicated team of talented people can create exceptional games.
Location: Austin, Texas
We are looking for awesome graphics engineers (with strong technical art skills!) who are excited about empowering mainstream consumers with the ability to create 3D graphics and animation. You will be working with exceptionally talented engineers and artists from top companies and universities such as Google, Nvidia, Blizzard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale. Not only will you have the unique opportunity to work on challenging technical problems, but also use your artistic instincts to develop visually stunning features for our 2M+ users worldwide!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-26-2018, 03:41 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
G2A’s payment service is charging users for inactivity
G2A Pay is charging a recurring service fee for members who are inactive for over 180 days, justifying the charge because “as a supervised financial institution, we must meet many requirements related to the monitoring and servicing of each account.”
It’s worth noting that this is separate from G2A, which is known for being a digital marketplace (similar to eBay) to sell video game keys. G2A Pay is its payment service.
First noticed by a user on Reddit, they share an email detailing a service charge of €1 (~$1.14) for nearly 180 days of inactivity on their account.
According to the post, a recurring fee of €1 will be charged every month after the 180 days pass during which the user does not log in.
Indie dev Dan Marshall posted a screenshot of the email to Twitter as well, leading to others speculating as to if the inactivity fee was real or not. Turns out that it is, and appears in G2A Pay’s terms and conditions under section two, item 20.
“It costs money to upkeep accounts and if someone does not use the account, it doesn’t make sense to upkeep it,” explains G2A Pay in an official statement (which is pinned to the original Reddit post referenced above).
“We don’t require these users to buy anything, just log in at least once every 6 months, just so that we know they are still with us. As a financial institution we are also monitored, supervised, and audited and have to back up and explain all our accounts and the funds stored on these accounts,” the post continues.
“Once an account may be considered ‘abandoned’ we take certain steps to make sure we are in line with all regulations, jurisdictions and laws.”
This has lead many users are question the legality of the charge, citing gift card laws, considering how gift cards are repositories for a cash balance and can be comparable to a user’s wallet in G2A Pay.
“Account balances are not the same as gift cards. You can use a gift card to recharge the balance on your G2A account, but you can also recharge it a myriad of other ways, therefore the two are not the same,” the company responded.
Join the Aftercharge Closed Beta on Xbox One 12/14 – 12/16!
This week we’re excited to invite all Xbox Insiders on Xbox One to participate in the Aftercharge Closed Beta! There’s limited space available for this Closed Beta, so please follow the steps under HOW TO PARTICIPATE to join in now.
Aftercharge is a 3 vs 3 competitive game pitting invisible robots against an invincible security squad in high-octane tactical skirmishes. Six glowing structures called extractor are at the center of the gameplay and serve as the objective for both teams.
The robots have to coordinate their attacks, create distractions and sneak around to destroy them. The enforcers on the other hand have to cover as much ground as possible and use their abilities wisely to spot the attackers and stop them before they can destroy all of the extractors.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
1. On your Xbox One console, sign in and launch the Xbox Insider Hub app (or install the Xbox Insider Hub app from the Store first if necessary). 2. From the main landing page, navigate to Insider content > Games > Aftercharge. 3. Select Join. 4. Wait for the registration to complete (Pending will disappear) to be redirected to the Store and install Aftercharge!
NOTE: Space is limited for the Aftercharge Closed Beta, and will be offered on a first-come first-served basis.
Submit feedback, suggestions, and issues you encounter via Report a problem (hold down the Xbox button on the controller and select Report a problem from the power menu).
Random: Man Uses Disguised NES Zapper To Rob A Bank
The NES Zapper was a cool little piece of kit back in the day, allowing gaming fans to use a realistic peripheral to enhance their experiences in titles like Duck Hunt, Wild Gunman, and more. As always, though, someone out there has to go and ruin the fun, with one man being caught using the accessory in a shocking criminal offence.
The earliest NES Zapper models, originally released back in 1984, were almost entirely grey to fit alongside the NES’ colour schemes. Soon after, Nintendo completely changed the design to include bright orange sections, realising that the simplistic grey models could potentially be mistaken for real weapons if they were taken outside. Of course, wrapping the toy in dark tape sadly negates this bright colouring, and that is exactly what happened in this particular case.
The NES Zapper’s usual appearance
The taped-up weapon was used by a man in Hermosillo, Mexico to rob a bank, with the accessory’s usually-bright colouring being almost entirely hidden from view. Bank workers reportedly described the man to local police who, after mounting an operation to find the culprit, managed to track him down and arrest him. The man in question is thought to have potentially been involved in up to 15 other crimes.
Now Available on Steam Early Access – ATLAS, 17% off!
ATLAS is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 17% off!*
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!
Ashen is a 3rd person, action RPG about forging relationships. You are a lone wanderer in a sunless land. The only light to be had sputters from an age-old lantern at your side. There is a rumble in the distance, and then a light. Through leaking eyes you make out a peak on the horizon, choking the land in a cloud of ash. Nothing ever shone so bright. The first dawn turns to dusk and finally recedes into familiar blackness. A GAME BY AURORA44. This is the tale of a bygone world. Choose a path and hold on to those you trust. Players can choose to guide those they trust to their camp, encouraging them to rest at the fire and perhaps remain. Together, you might just stand a chance.
Is Bumblebee A Transformers Reboot? Timeline And Ending Explained
While Bumblebee may not have a proper post credits sequence, it does tack on an extra little bit of story before the credits actually roll, rounding out the plot and setting up for sequels--maybe? Bumblebee's stinger (pun intended) doesn't have a lot of meat to it, but it does start treading some strangely murky water when you actually look at it in the scope of the whole live action Transformers franchise, which Bumblebee appears to have rebooted--emphasis on "appears to."
Needless to say, spoilers to follow--not just from Bumblebee, but from whole swaths of the Transformers franchise.
Bumblebee highlights the first major Earth-based interaction of Bumblebee the Autobot, and a human girl named Charlie who finds him as a VW Beetle in a junkyard. The whole story is set in the 1980s, not long after the "fall" of Cybertron to the Decepticon army. Charlie and Bee are chased around Earth for a while by two new Decepticons, Shatter and Dropkick, as well as John Cena, before eventually saving the day and--tragically--going their separate ways. Charlie gets a new car--a refurbished classic Camaro she and her late dad had been working on--and Bee, having effectively blown his VW Bug cover, takes a new alternate form of a black and yellow modern Camaro.
Then, following their bittersweet goodbye, we see Bee rendezvousing with a recently arrived Optimus Prime, who hopefully directs his attention to the sky where around seven Cybertronian crafts can be seen entering the atmosphere. It's all very obviously working to set up the next movie in the sequence--though it seems to simultaneously be working to slot itself into the groundwork laid by the first Michael Bay movie back in 2007. It was that first movie in which Bumblebee chose a modern Camaro as his alt-mode, after all, and the place where the whole idea of Bee using his radio to talk was first introduced. If this movie does anything, it's provide Bee a worthy origin story expressly for that 2007 debut, filling in all the gaps that any fan would ever want filled as charmingly as possible.
However, filling those gaps and answering those questions also creates new ones. The Bay arm of the Transformers franchise began getting seriously off the rails with its own history right off the bat by establishing the presence of the "AllSpark" (a mythological Cybertronian artifact) on Earth as early as the 1800s in the first film. Later, in the most recent installment of the Bay movies, Transformers: The Last Knight, it was implied that Cybertronians had reached Earth back in the days of Arthurian legend. Prior to that, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen raised the idea that Cybertronians had been aware of Earth since antiquity and even been involved in the rise of Ancient Egypt.
But Bumblebee gives us a look at not only the fall of Cybertron itself--happening, apparently, in relative real time to the mid '80s on Earth--but also explicitly tells us that this moment was actually the first time Optimus Prime had ever scanned for or sent anyone to Earth at all, making Bumblebee the first Cybertronian to set foot on the planet. This later seems to be supported by the arrival of the movie's main antagonists, Decepticons Dropkick and Shatter, who make the whole "first contact" schtick an ongoing gag.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that future installments in the post-Bumblebee Transformers franchise are going to have to work from the ground up. Everything regarding the timeline is just vague enough that, with a little narrative hopscotching, it's possible to slot stories into the mix that justify the temporal strangeness. After all, if we're to assume that the AllSpark just hasn't been "activated" yet in the '80s, it's completely possible than the Transformers arrived on the planet and were none the wiser, left, and then came back when it was. The characters that would, in theory, be duplicates of robots who have already shown up in the Bay movies--like Starscream and Ravage--could easily just be seen here in older alt-modes or less advanced forms. There's no real limit to the amount of hand waving that can happen in a universe like this.
Or, more likely, future Transformers movies are just going to cherry pick exactly what they want from the established canon and easily forego the rest. Bumblebee may not represent a direct, hard reboot of the entire franchise, but it's certainly a major departure in tone and direction--while it may be making a vague attempt to at least loosely hold things together, it's absolutely not beholden to weave the entire shared universe into one cohesive thing. And to be honest, that's probably for the best.
