Microsoft, and in particular the Xbox brand, has struggled to get a leg up over the competition throughout the current generation. The Xbox One was controversial out of the gate, and even with continuous effort from Microsoft to improve user experience they aren’t keeping their customers. With previous major releases like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 underperforming and potential system sellers like Scalebound getting cancelled, Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up. With only Crackdown 3, another Gears of War, another Halo, and another Forza on the horizon, Microsoft needs to make some major announcements of big, and most importantly new, exclusives to get people back on Xbox.
This week, Steam announced that it no longer plans on moderating any content put on it’s store, barring things that are “illegal” or “trolling.” What this means is obviously open to interpretation, with legality varying from country to country and trolling being possibly the most vague term they could have chosen.
The latter half of 2017 and the fist few months of 2018 were very eventful for Electronic Arts. Visceral Games was shuttered, and EA acquired Respawn Entertainment. The company almost singlehandedly launched a wave of government regulation because of the loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront II. A Way Out was released and was very positively received by critics and players alike. More recently, the trailer for Battlefield V stirred controversy by showing a woman fighting in WWII (the gall of them).
Last year’s 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference was marked by the announcement of the Homepod as well as a new configuration of the 10.5 inch iPad, updates to the Macbook line and the all new iMac Pro. This year’s WWDC 2018 has taken a much more software-focused approach.
Tonight the Pokémon Company announced a pair of new Pokémon titles Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, as well as the free-to-start game Pokémon Quest for the Nintendo Switch.
A game that appeared on the Steam storefront today that will allow players to play as a school shooter is causing controversy, especially in light of the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18th. According to testimony from Russian developer Revived Games, the game will allow players to play either as an active shooter armed with an assault rifle, a member of a responding SWAT team, or a civilian, in what the developer calls a “survival mode.”
Starting at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 20th and ending at 5 p.m. the next day, eight Ball State student competed in the annual AT&T IoT Civic Hackathon. The event had teams developing Internet of Things devices to improve certain professions. This year’s profession was first responders.
In the video aggregate site’s most recent response to controversies surrounding former content producers, Channel Awesome has seemingly revealed the identity of a sexual predator who used to work in association with the company. Chatlogs shown in the company’s response indicated that former contributor Justin Carmical was grooming and assaulting other Channel Awesome content producers. These revelations are the product of a series of responses to a list of grievances levied against Channel Awesome by a number of people who used to make content that was hosted on the Channel Awesome website. The nature of the grievances levied against Channel Awesome’s present and past management include poor management, sexism, and even protecting sexual predators.
The Cardinal Screenplay Festival, now in its third year, is a celebration of the Department of English’s best scripts, written by students and performed by both students and faculty. The scripts are chosen from the screenwriting courses, in this case English 410 and 615.
The Xenharmonic New Music Showcase 2018 features composers from all around Indiana, as well as from Denver, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts. BSU graduate student Stephen Weigel will be performing as well, and was able to answer a few questions for us.
Ball State’s Spectrum will be putting on their semi-annual free drag show open to the public on Saturday April 14 at 7 p.m. in the Ball Gymnasium. The proceeds generated by audience donations will be going towards the Trans Women of Color Collective.
