© Nintendo Life

It’s fair to say that Nintendo’s erstwhile rival Sega shocked everyone when it announced that it was creating a teeny, tiny version of its Game Gear handheld to celebrate its 60th birthday. Actually, we should back up a little there; the fact that the company was choosing to refresh a classic system wasn’t surprising in itself – after all, we’ve had the NES Classic Edition, PC Engine Mini and Mega Drive Mini over the past few years – but it was more the manner in which Sega was resurrecting the console that dropped jaws.

The ¥4,980 / $50 / €50 Game Gear Micro really does live up its name – it’s even smaller than the almost unacceptably dinky Game Boy Micro and the screen is around the size of a postage stamp – and it’s available in five colour options which each come with their own selection of games. So, to experience the entire range, you’ve got to stump up the cash for all five. Crazy enough for you yet? How about the fact that the Game Gear Micro is totally exclusive to Japan?

Now, before we dive too deeply into Sega’s seemingly deranged business practices, it’s worth noting that the Game Gear Micro is, on face value, a lovely little product that is clearly aimed at a Japanese audience which loves tiny collectable trinkets. The packaging – which is smaller than a Game Boy Advance box, for reference – is utterly adorable and the unit itself feels solid enough. Even the minuscule 1.1-inch LCD display is better than we were expecting; it’s pin-sharp and colourful, although staring at it for any length of time is likely to give most people an absolutely blinding headache.

There’s no internal rechargeable battery, so you’ll either need two AAA batteries or a Micro-USB cable to play it, but there is a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, as well as a volume dial. Not that you’re likely to actually play this thing all that much; sure, the buttons and D-Pad are enlarged (at least in terms of scale) and they’re reasonably responsive, but that’s about it. This is not a comfortable piece of hardware to use for prolonged periods of time, even if you do somehow decide that the display is acceptable (perhaps by using the optional ‘Big Window’ screen magnifier).

And don’t get us started on the game selection. Splitting the available titles across all five units is understandable when you take into account that this is very much a collectable item and the Japanese sure do love hoovering up collectables, but it’s also a really, really dumb move. Sega could easily have included all of the available games on each unit (and then some); the way things are, if you want to experience the best titles on offer here, you’ve really got to stump up the cash for every single unit, which could cost you anything up to $400 when you consider that the Aleste-focused system is A) more expensive than the others and B) has sold out everywhere and is now changing hands for way more than its RRP.

Sure, an effort has been made to add at least a little value – for example, the red unit we got also comes with ‘easy’ versions of two of its games, Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible and Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible Special – but four games per variant really isn’t anywhere near enough when you consider the asking price.

For example, Sonic, Shinobi GG, Gunstar Heroes and GG Aleste II – four of the best Game Gear titles known to mankind – are all on different variants of the Game Gear Micro, so if you’re after any of those, you’re almost certainly going to have to buy a unit which also features at least one game you’re either totally uninterested in or can’t play because it’s all in Japanese. We should perhaps be thankful that Sega included four games on each, as there were plans for it to be even less.

Had Sega opted to release each colour variant with 40 of the best Game Gear titles, then we’d be able to cautiously recommend this odd piece of hardware, despite its Lilliputian proportions. An even better outcome would have been to release a new Game Gear that’s only slightly smaller than the bulky original model (say, the size of the original Game Boy Advance) and pre-load that with titles as well as the ability to run original cartridges. Given that Nintendo hasn’t pounced on the idea of a Game Boy Classic Edition as yet, it would have been the perfect opportunity for Sega to steal a march on its former adversary and produce a portable that truly celebrates one of its most iconic pieces of hardware – and just in time for the lucrative Christmas season, too.

But alas, we’re dreaming now. What we have instead is an impractical trinket that will look amazing on our shelf but does a pretty dismal job of highlighting Sega’s amazing handheld legacy.

© Nintendo Life

Thanks to Richard from Game Boy Shack for kindly loaning us his boxed Game Gear for use in this feature.

Woodsalt, an upcoming sci-fi adventure destined for Nintendo Switch, has been delayed until this December, it’s been announced.

Originally planned to launch this week, the game has a new release date of 9th December on both Switch and Steam. The game’s eShop page has been temporarily taken down, but will no doubt be restored a little closer to the new launch window.

If you haven’t heard of it before, the game is set on the planet of Nu-Terra, 1000 years after Earth was evacuated during chaotic natural disasters and an attack by giant creatures. Players take on the role of Emcy, an Earth-born man who is awakened from stasis into a new city as they wait for a signal to return back home. Here’s an official description:

Emerging from cryostasis to discover a brand-new world inWoodsalt, players control Emcy, whose proclivity for sleep has taken him to Nu-Terra, a sprawling city contained within a bubble, 1000 years after disaster on Earth. How? Why? What? Where? As you develop relationships with a cast of quirky characters and otherworldly locales, steadily uncover a mystery that spans the entire universe and your very existence.

Will you be keeping an eye out for this one when it launches later this year? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Writing this article, I must confess, was very challenging.

Not because the content is difficult to write about—be assured, it isn’t—but because it involves scrolling through Reddit to find the best posts, comments, and subreddits regarding freelance developing. Have you ever found yourself endlessly scrolling through Reddit?

Well—somehow I accomplished finishing this article despite the distractions on Reddit. A short summary of the three best and most general posts about freelance developing in Reddit:

• Being a freelance web developer
• The Complete Freelance Web Developer Guide: How to Make Money Through Freelance Programming Jobs
• Web Design: Only started in Jan this year, making over $10,000 consistently every month. Lots of lessons… AMA

Do you search for something more specific? Have a look at the table of contents and click on the topic that interests you most!

IF YOU CLICK ON ANY REDDIT SCREENSHOT, IT’LL OPEN THE POST IN A NEW TAB!

[Top 3] Freelance Developer Salary Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Software Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance iOS Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Back-End Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Front-End Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance WordPress Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Game Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Python Developer Reddit

[Top 3] Freelance Android Developer Reddit

Do you want to develop the skills of a well-rounded Python professional—while getting paid in the process? Become a Python freelancer and order your book Leaving the Rat Race with Python on Amazon (Kindle/Print)!

The post Freelance Developer Reddit — 30 Posts to Binge-Read first appeared on Finxter.

Modus Games has today announced that upcoming JRPG Cris Tales will no longer be launching next month as planned.

Originally destined for Switch and other consoles on 17th November, the title will now arrive on all platforms – both current and next gen – in 2021. Christina Seelye, the company’s CEO, says that the decision wasn’t an easy one to make.

“The decision to delay was a tough one, but was made to ensure that the developers at Dreams Uncorporated and SYCK have a chance to bring the best version of Cris Tales to fans anxiously awaiting its release.”

There is some good news, though, as those who choose to pre-order a copy of the retail version of the game will now receive a bonus poster.

Carlos Rocha Silva, CEO of Dreams Uncorporated and SYCK, the developers of Cris Tales, has shared the following message with fans:

“To every Cris Tales fan, thank you for the interest in our game. We began development in 2014 and we hope it’s more than clear to all of you that this is a labor of love for us. Much of the team here became friends by believing in what we thought might be an impossible dream – the dream to create a video game that is both an homage to the golden age of JRPGs and also a completely innovative experience within the genre. We never believed that Cris Tales would reach an audience so big and diverse, and that people were going to love the dream and game as much as we do.

That is why we want to tell everyone who is eager for the release of Cris Tales that along with Modus Games we have made the difficult decision of postponing the release date of Cris Tales from November 17, 2020 to sometime in early 2021.

We are a very small video game development studio located in the city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. Cris Tales is the biggest project we have ever worked on, and we want to get it right. As you probably know, most areas and people in the game must be created at least three times, if not more to show the different past, present and futures. So, in a way, it’s like developing three different video games at the same time. Three video games that must be impeccable so that we can deliver all the magic we have in our soul to all of you. We want to make sure to earn all the love you’ve all shown in our events, demos, previews and so much more.”

Nintendo’s handhelds have been the focus of fan-made mods for years, with industrious individuals doing everything from fitting better screens to creating entirely new case designs to make their Game Boy, GBA or DS stand out from the crowd.

However, Rose Colored Gaming has been doing this for longer than most, and the company – which also creates display stands and other custom hardware – has just teased a GBA mod which makes the console look like a Pokédex from the Pokémon series of video games.

We made a Pokedex prop that bears a striking similarity to a Game Boy Advance. More to come…

Note the use of the word “prop” in there – it could well be that this particular mod is more for show rather than actual use. Still, that doesn’t stop us wanting it really, really badly.

Novel object captioning

Image captioning is a core challenge in the discipline of computer vision, one that requires an AI system to understand and describe the salient content, or action, in an image, explained Lijuan Wang, a principal research manager in Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond.

“You really need to understand what is going on, you need to know the relationship between objects and actions and you need to summarize and describe it in a natural language sentence,” she said.

Wang led the research team that achieved – and beat – human parity on the novel object captioning at scale, or nocaps, benchmark. The benchmark evaluates AI systems on how well they generate captions for objects in images that are not in the dataset used to train them.

Image captioning systems are typically trained with datasets that contain images paired with sentences that describe the images, essentially a dataset of captioned images.

“The nocaps challenge is really how are you able to describe those novel objects that you haven’t seen in your training data?” Wang said.

To meet the challenge, the Microsoft team pre-trained a large AI model with a rich dataset of images paired with word tags, with each tag mapped to a specific object in an image.

Datasets of images with word tags instead of full captions are more efficient to create, which allowed Wang’s team to feed lots of data into their model. The approach imbued the model with what the team calls a visual vocabulary.

The visual vocabulary pre-training approach, Huang explained, is similar to prepping children to read by first using a picture book that associates individual words with images, such as a picture of an apple with the word “apple” beneath it and a picture of a cat with the word “cat” beneath it.

“This visual vocabulary pre-training essentially is the education needed to train the system; we are trying to educate this motor memory,” Huang said.

The pre-trained model is then fine-tuned for captioning on the dataset of captioned images. In this stage of training, the model learns how to compose a sentence. When presented with an image containing novel objects, the AI system leverages the visual vocabulary to generate an accurate caption.

“It combines what is learned in both the pre-training and the fine-tuning to handle novel objects in the testing,” Wang said.

When evaluated on nocaps, the AI system created captions that were more descriptive and accurate than the captions for the same images that were written by people, according to results presented in a research paper.